Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary

Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary

Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary book cover (1943)
Author	Robert Henry Mathews
Country	China
Language	Chinese, English
Publisher	China Inland Mission Press
Publication date	1931, 1943
Media type	print
Pages	xxiv, 1226
OCLC	825731138

A Chinese-English Dictionary: Compiled for the China Inland Mission by R. H. Mathews (1931) or Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary (1943), edited by the Australian Congregationalist missionary Robert Henry Mathews (1877-1970), was the standard Chinese-English dictionary for decades. Mathews originally intended his dictionary to be a revision of Frederick W. Baller's out-of-print (1900) An Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary, Compiled for the China Inland Mission, but ended up compiling a new dictionary. Mathews copied, without any acknowledgment, from Herbert Allen Giles' (1892, 1912) A Chinese-English Dictionary.

The 1,250-page first edition contained 7,783 Chinese character head entries, alphabetically collated by romanized syllabic order in modified Wade-Giles system, and includes 104,000 words and phrases taken from the classics, general literature, and news media. Owing a World War II shortage of Chinese-English dictionaries, Harvard University Press published a revised American edition (1943) Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, which included 15,000 corrections, revisions, and new examples.

The Australian Congregationalist missionary and lexicographer Robert Henry Mathews was born in 1877 in Flemington, Victoria. After studying lithography at the Working Men's College of Melbourne, Mathews started a printing business, but in 1906 he abandoned it to join the China Inland Mission (CIM) and become a missionary. Mathews first sailed to China in 1908, and the CIM assigned him to stations in Henan, Anhui, where he became interested in studying the regional varieties of Chinese, and Sichuan.