The Five Thousand Dictionary
Front cover of The Five Thousand Dictionary
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| Author | Courtenay Hughes Fenn |
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| Country | China |
| Language | Chinese, English |
| Publisher | Mission Book Company |
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Publication date
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1926, 1942 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 578, 49 |
| OCLC | 1671398 |
The Five Thousand Dictionary: A Chinese-English Dictionary… (1926) or Fenn's Chinese-English Pocket-Dictionary (1942), which was compiled by American missionary Courtenay H. Fenn, is a widely reprinted learners' dictionary that selected Chinese character entries on the basis of common usage. It was the first Chinese-English dictionary to indicate the neutral tone associated with weak syllables.
Courtenay Hughes Fenn, more commonly known as Courtenay H. Fenn or C. H. Fenn, (1886-1953) was a missionary under the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in China from 1893 to 1925 (Shavit 1990: 162).
Fenn's dictionary was originally intended to be an index of the 5,000 character flashcards used by the North China Union Language School, in the California College in China (later incorporated into Claremont Colleges), Beijing. After compiling the indexing information, Fenn decided to create a pocket dictionary for students of Chinese as a foreign language, and was assisted by Chin Hsien-Tseng. Courtenay H. Fenn's foreword expresses his satisfaction in giving the public a dictionary "the lack of which he has personally felt keenly for the more than thirty years of his sojourn in 'The Land of Sinim'" (1942: iv), using the Biblical name Sinim (Hebrew for "inhabitants of the land of sin") that some scholars associate with Greek Sinae "China".
Limiting a Chinese learners' dictionary to 5,000 characters is linguistically sound. Statistical studies of Chinese character usage have shown that an average college-educated Chinese person who is not a specialist in classical literature or history has an active vocabulary of between 3,000 and 4,000 characters (Norman 1988: 73). Fenn's dictionary was preceded by William Edward Soothill's The Student's Four Thousand Tzu and General Pocket Dictionary (1900), and Fenn's colleague Hsien-Tseng Chin later compiled The Three Thousand Dictionary of the Chinese Script (1941).
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