When was the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary first published?

The ABC Chinese–English Dictionary or ABC Dictionary (1996), compiled under the chief editorship of John DeFrancis, is the first Chinese dictionary to collate entries in single-sort alphabetical order of pinyin romanization, and a landmark in the history of Chinese lexicography. It was also the first publication in the University of Hawai'i Press's "ABC" (Alphabetically Based Computerized) series of Chinese dictionaries. They republished the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" in a pocket edition (1999) and desktop reference edition (2000), as well as the expanded "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (2003) and dual "ABC Chinese–English/English-Chinese Dictionary" (2010). Furthermore, the "ABC Dictionary" databases have been developed into computer applications such as Wenlin Software for learning Chinese (1997).

ABC Chinese–English Dictionary

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was an influential American sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. After he retired from teaching in 1976, DeFrancis was a prolific author of influential works such as "" (1984) and "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" (1989).

Victor H. Mair, a sinologist and professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, first proposed the idea of a computerized pinyin Chinese–English dictionary in his 1986 lexicographical review article "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese." He defined "alphabetically arranged dictionary" to mean a dictionary in which all words ("cí" 詞) are "interfiled strictly according to pronunciation. This may be referred to as a "single sort/tier/layer alphabetical" order or series." He emphatically does not mean a usual Chinese dictionary collated according to the initial single graphs ("zì" 字) that are only the beginning syllables of whole words. "With the latter type of arrangement, more than one sort is required to locate a given term. The head character must first be found and then a separate sort is required for the next character, and so on." (1986: 2). Mair's article had two purposes, to call the attention of his colleagues to the critical need for an alphabetically arranged Chinese dictionary and to enlist their help in making it a reality, and to suggest that "all" new sinological reference tools should at least include alphabetically ordered indices. "Someone who already knows the pronunciation of a given expression but not its meaning should not be cruelly burdened by having to fuss with radicals, corners, strokes, and what not. Let him go directly to the object of his search instead of having to make endless, insufferable detours in an impenetrable forest of graphs." (1986: 20).

In DeFrancis' Acknowledgements, he says "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair", who after unsuccessful attempts to obtain financial support for the compilation of an alphabetically based Chinese–English dictionary, in 1990 organized an international group of scholars who volunteered to contribute towards compiling it. However, "agonizingly slow progress" made it apparent that a fulltime editor was necessary, and in May 1992 John DeFrancis offered to undertake the project centered at the University of Hawai'i (1996: ix).

Along with Prof. DeFrancis overseeing the general planning and supervision of the project as well as its detailed operations, a volunteer team of some 50 contributors – including academics, Chinese language teachers, students, lexicographers, and computer consultants – were involved in the myriad tasks of processing dictionary entries, such as defining, inputting, checking, and proofreading. The University of Hawai'i Press published the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" in September 1996. UHP republished the original paperback "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary", which had a total 916 pages and was 23 cm. high, into the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary: Pocket Edition" (1999, 16 cm.) and hardback "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary: Desk Reference Edition" (2000, 23 cm.).

In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".

Victor H. Mair became general editor of the ABC Chinese Dictionary Series in 1996, and the University of Hawai'i Press has issued ten publications (as of October 2016), including two developments from the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (1996) with 71,486 head entries. John DeFrancis and others edited the hardback "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (2003, 1464 pp., 25 cm.), which contains over 196,501 head entries, making it the most comprehensive one-volume dictionary of Chinese. DeFrancis (posthumously) and Zhang Yanyin, professor of Applied Linguistics and Educational Linguistics at the University of Canberra, edited the bidirectional paperback "ABC Chinese–English/English-Chinese Dictionary" (2010, 1240 pp., 19 cm.). It contains 67,633 entries: 29,670 in the English-Chinese section, 37,963 in the Chinese–English section, which is an abridgment of the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" and includes improvements such as more usage example sentences.

Computers (namely, the "C" in "ABC Dictionary") were purposefully involved in almost every stage of dictionary compilation and publication in order to facilitate further advances in electronic lexicography and software development. In 1997, the Wenlin Institute published "Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese" with about 14,000 head entries (version 1.0) and entered into a licensing agreement with the University of Hawaii to utilize the "ABC Dictionary" database in Wenlin software. The first edition "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (1996) was incorporated into Wenlin 2.0 with over 74,000 entries (1998); the second "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (2003) went into Wenlin 3.0 with over 196,000 entries (2002); and the third edition "ABC English-Chinese/Chinese–English Dictionary" (2010) was incorporated into Wenlin 4.0 (2011), which includes 300,000 Chinese–English entries, 73,000 Chinese character entries, and 62,000 English-Chinese entries.

Prior to the alphabetically arranged "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary", virtually every Chinese dictionary was based upon character head entries, arranged either by character shape or pronunciation, that subsume words and phrases written with that head character as the first syllable. While pronunciation determines the placement of words within the unconventional "ABC Dictionary", Chinese characters still determine the position of words within a standard dictionary. Comparing a Chinese character-based dictionary with the pinyin-based "ABC Dictionary" illustrates the difference. "The Chinese–English Dictionary" (Wu 1979: 431) locates the head character entry "lín" 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② circles …" as one of 14 characters pronounced "lín", and alphabetically lists 17 words with "lín" as the first syllable, for instance, "línchǎnpǐn" 林产品 "forest products", "línhǎi" 林海 "immense forest", and "línyè" 林業 "forestry". The "ABC Dictionary" includes "lín" 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② forestry…" as one of 6 characters pronounced "lín", followed by alphabetically listed "lin"-initial headwords from "línbā" 淋巴 "lymph" to "línfēng" 臨風 "facing against the wind", but then "ling"-initial words begin to appear with "líng" 〇 "zero", and only after another three pages will one find "lìngzūn" 令尊 "(courteous) your father" followed by "línhǎi" "immense forest" (McGinnis 1997: 568). DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" is aptly described as having "defied the tyranny of Chinese characters" (Clark 2001: 387).

The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).

The present dictionary has several titles:

The "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" comprises three main sections: an 18-page front matter, the 833-page body matter of alphabetically arranged entries, and 64-page back matter with nine appendices.

The front matter includes a Table of contents; Dedication to "China's Staunchest Advocates of Writing Reform"; Editor's Call to Action; Acknowledgments; Introduction with I. Distinctive Features of the Dictionary and II. Selection and Definition of Entries; and User's Guide with I. Arrangement of Entries, II. Orthography, III. Explanatory Notes and Examples, IV. Works Consulted, and V. Abbreviations (1996: i–xix).

The dictionary proper gives alphabetically arranged lexical entries and English translation equivalents, from "a* 啊'[i.e., particle] "used as phrase suffix" ① ("in enumeration") … ② ("in direct address and exclamation") … ③ ("indicating obviousness/impatience" … ④ ("for confirmation")" to "zúzūn 族尊'clan seniors" (1996: 1 and 833, usage examples omitted).

The "ABC Dictionary" has nine Appendices: I. Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography [promulgated by the State Language Commission in 1988]; II. Historical Chronology [from the Shang Dynasty c. 1700–1045 BC to the Republic of China "1912–1949" and People's Republic of China 1949–]; III. Analytic Summary of Transcription Systems [for Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Yale Romanization, and Zhuyin Fuhao]; IV. Wade-Giles/Pinyin Comparative Table; V. PY/WG/GR/YR/ZF Comparative Table; VI. Radical Index of Traditional Characters, Notes on Kangxi Radicals, Kangxi Radical Chart, Kangxi Radical Index; VII. Stroke Order List of Recurrent Partials; VIII. Stroke Order Index of Characters with Obscure Radicals; IX. Radical Index of Simplified Characters, with Notes on Selected CASS Radicals [viz. the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences system of 189 radicals used in dictionaries like the "Xinhua Zidian"], High Frequency CASS Radicals, Simplified/Traditional Radical Conversion Table, CASS Radical Chart, CASS Radical Index [for users who want to look up a Chinese logograph's pronunciation, listing the 5,425 characters appearing in the dictionary] (1996: 835–897).

DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" claims six lexicographical distinctions.

The main source for "ABC Dictionary" entries is the 1989 edition of "Hanyu Pinyin Cihui" 汉語拼音詞汇 "Hanyu Pinyin Romanized Lexicon", a semi-official wordlist of 60,400 entries (without definitions) compiled by members of the PRC State Language Commission. Focusing upon the needs of Western students of Chinese, DeFrancis and the editors eliminated some terms and added others. Their dictionary includes many neologisms such as "dàgēdà" 大哥大 "cellular phone" or "dǎo(r)yé" 倒爷 "profiteer; speculator", as well as the modern Chinese practice of incorporating the Latin alphabet in coining Sino-alphabetic words like "BP-jī" BP机 "pager; beeper".

In contrast to most Chinese–English dictionaries, DeFrancis' emphasizes multisyllabic "cí" "words" rather than monosyllabic "zì" "characters". It only includes monosyllabic character entries that are likely to be encountered as free forms or unbound morphemes (according to the "Xiandai Hanyu Pinlü Cidian" 现代汉语频率词典 "Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese").

Chinese word frequency is an important aspect of the "ABC Dictionary", and it lists homophones according to their decreasing occurrence. Frequency orders are based largely on "Xiandai Hanyu Pinlü Cidian" for monosyllabic entries and "Zhongwen Shumianyu Pinlü Cidian" 中文书面语频率词典 "Dictionary of the Chinese Written Language" for polysyllabic words (1996: xiii). For entries with identical spelling, including tones, arrangement is by order of frequency, indicated by a superscript number before the transcription, a device adapted from Western lexicographic practice to distinguish homonyms. For example, "dàomù 盜墓'rob graves" and "dàomù 道木'railway sleeper [tie]". For entries that are homographic if tones are disregarded, the item of highest usage frequency is indicated by an asterisk following the transcription (see "a"* 啊 above), for instance, "lìguǐ 厉鬼'ferocious ghost" and "lìguì* 立柜'clothes-closet; wardrobe; hanging cupboard". While frequency information is useful for students learning vocabulary, the "ABC Dictionary" chiefly provides it in order to help determine the default items in computer usage. "Our unique combination of letters, tone marks, and raised numbers provides a simple and distinctive one-to-one correspondence between transcription and character(s) that is intended to facilitate computerized handling of the entries." (1996: xiv).

The "ABC Dictionary" format for entries is (1996: xiii):

Take the "dao" in Daoism for an example dictionary entry.
dào 道 ① road ② channel ③ way ④ doctrine ⑤ Daoism ⑥ line ♦'"for rivers/topics/etc." ♦'① say; speak; talk chángyán dào as the saying goes Tā shuō ~: "..." He said: "..." ② think; suppose (1996: 113)
This concise entry uses a superscript on "dào" to denote 道 as the second most commonly occurring unbound character pronounced "dào", gives six English translation equivalents, distinguishes syntactic uses as a measure word and a verb, and gives two characterless usage examples "chángyán dào" 常言道 and "Tā shuōdào" 他說道.

Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.

Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions" (Bauer 1997: 307); "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and comprehensive coverage of the colloquial language should make it a favourite of all serious students of Modem Chinese" (Jensen 1998: 144); "This excellent one-volume Chinese–English dictionary is a crowning achievement for John DeFrancis, one of the doyens of Chinese language teaching in the United States" (Sawer 2001: 224).

A common area of complaint involves the "ABC Dictionary"'s treatment of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Dictionary entries give simplified characters for headwords, and only give the traditional form upon the first appearance of each character, and in the appendices. For instance, critics say, "looking up characters in traditional form is a bit more trouble than it might be, you must use a special index" (Chung 1998: 660); and the dictionary is "clearly not designed to be used by anyone who does serious work with nonsimplified characters" (Jensen 1998: 144).

One reviewer panned the "ABC Dictionary"'s supplementary materials. For instance, saying the front matter's "uncommonly profuse" dedication and Editor's Call to Action reveal "no doubt that axes are being ground" about writing reform; the Distinctive Features of the Dictionary "reads like an abstract for a research grant application"; and describing most of the appendices as "a hodgepodge of pub quiz trivia" (Jensen 1998: 143).

Several evaluations of the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" mention cases in which using the alphabetically-arranged headword entries is more efficient than using a conventionally arranged dictionary with character head entries that list words written with that character as the first. Robert S. Bauer, a linguist of Cantonese at Hong Kong Polytechnic University says the dictionary works best when users hear a word pronounced but do not know how to write it in characters, they can very quickly look it up in pinyin order and find the correct characters and meanings. However, to look up an unknown character's pronunciation and meaning, then one needs to use a radical-indexed dictionary. Bauer says "I have generally succeeded in finding almost all the words and expressions I have tried to look up; this I regard as quite remarkable since I cannot say the same about other dictionaries I have been consulting over my more than 25 years of working on Chinese." (1997: 308). Sean Jensen says alphabetical collation is "truly iconoclastic" in the tradition-rich world of Chinese lexicography and describes experimenting with using the dictionary.
I am used to the "old style" dictionaries based on radicals, and I was disposed to approach the "ABC Dictionary" with some skepticism. But having used it for two months I have so(sic) say that it is nothing short of wonderful! It is a pleasure to be able to use a Chinese dictionary in the same way that one uses a French or German dictionary. The typography is exceptionally clear, and the sheer quantity of words per page, arranged alphabetically, has the effect of bringing the melodies of spoken Chinese alive. (1998: 144)
Michael Sawer, professor of Chinese at the University of Canberra, says using the "ABC Dictionary" does not make it easy to quickly find all the words beginning with the same Chinese character; but it does enable readers to easily find all those pronounced the same (disregarding tonal differences), as well as which among homophonous words is used most frequently (2001: 224).

Taking a contrary view, Karen Steffen Chung, professor of Chinese at National Taiwan University, found using DeFrancis' dictionary less satisfying than traditional dictionaries, where all compounds beginning with the same character are listed together under that character head entry. Giving the circular example of a hypothetical dictionary user wanting to find all the compounds beginning with "shí" 實 "to realize", which is certainly easier with a customary Chinese dictionary than with the "ABC", Chung says that the alphabetic arrangement is unfortunately "its biggest drawback", and while "this may reflect an ideal of treating Chinese primarily as a spoken rather than written language, it also goes against native habit and intuition." (1998: 660).

Scott McGinnis, professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, explains that users of the "ABC Dictionary" who are already familiar with written Chinese and dictionaries organized by character headings must "forget" what they know about the Mandarin syllabic inventory and focus strictly on the spelling. For some dictionary users, purely pinyin-dependent sequencing such as "cuānzi" 镩子 "ice pick" to "cūbào" 粗暴 "rude; rough; crude" and "nǎngshí" 曩时 "(written) in olden days; of yore" to "nánguā" 南瓜 "pumpkin" "may be at least initially confusing" (1997: 568).

Jan W. Walls, professor of Chinese language and culture at Simon Fraser University, describes some minor oversights in the dictionary such as the "dīshì 的士 taxi" entry, which might imply the borrowing came directly from English, when it actually is a loanword from Cantonese "dik si" 的士 transcribing "taxi". But this is a minor point, "merely "meizhong-buzu" 美中不足 (defined in "ABC" as "blemish in sth. otherwise perfect") that should not detract from the great value of this important work … which is quite likely to become a standard reference work for English-speaking students of Mandarin, and to remain so for quite some time." (1998: 113–114).

The expanded 2003 "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" had fewer academic reviews than the 1996 "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary".

Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).

The 2003 "ABC", like the 1996 first edition, is arranged in strict single-sort alphabetical order, while both the "CED" and "CCD" are in double-sort alphabetic order—that is, the first syllables of each word are arranged in alphabetic order, and then within each tone category in order of different characters. Take for instance, dictionary users wanting to look up "yìshi" 意识 "consciousness; mentality". A user who knows the pronunciation begins with "yì" can search (in ascending number of strokes) through some eighty characters pronounced "yì" before finding 意, and then 意识; or a user who knows that "yìshi" is written 意识 can find 意 in the radical index, under the "heart radical" 心, then the 9 remaining strokes in 音, and find the page number for the 意 head entry (Sawer 2004: 310). A great advantage of "ABC" is that you can immediately look up a word you have heard but whose exact tone, meaning, and characters are unknown to you. For "yishi" in all tonal combinations, this dictionary gives 46 different words, with 意识 easily found. What an "ABC" user cannot straightforwardly see (which of course they can in the other two dictionaries) is all the words listed beginning with "yì" 意.

"ABC" gives grammatical information with around 30 tags, including both parts of speech ("V." for verb) and other tags ("ID." for idiom). "CED" provides just 11 grammatical tags, while "CCD" only marks numerals and classifiers. The comprehensive grammatical tags in "ABC" are "a most valuable feature", especially for learners of Chinese, and many words have more than one grammatical function (e.g., " xuéxí" 学习 [學習]'study; learn; emulate ◆'learning"). Another useful "ABC" grammatical tag is B.F. for "bound form" (as opposed to free form words, mentioned above), but this distinction is not usually indicated in PRC dictionaries such as "CED" and "CCD" (Sawer 2004: 311).

Proper nouns receive a particularly ample treatment in "ABC" (especially compared with "CED" and "CCD"). These include people's names (e.g., some 15 beginning with the surname Lǐ 李, ranging from the famous poet Li Bai to the former PRC President Li Xiannian), names of automobiles (like "Xiàlì" 夏利 "Charade"), and many toponyms ("Xiàwēiyí" 夏威夷 "Hawaii", spelled with the ʻokina) (Sawer 2004: 312).

Yanfang Tang, professor of Chinese at the College of William and Mary, says the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" "stands above its peers as one of the most comprehensive, informative, and useful tools in the study of and dealing with the Chinese language" (2005: 145). This dictionary is a valuable asset for several types of users. Native speakers will particularly benefit from the "authentic and accurate English translations" of Chinese words and phrases, which are an improvement over sometimes "stiff and awkward" translations in previous Chinese–English dictionaries, which were edited predominantly by Anglophone native speakers of Chinese. Chinese–English translators, students of Chinese as a foreign language, and compilers of Chinese language textbooks will find this dictionary indispensable for providing comprehensive linguistic information. Nonnative speakers of Chinese will find the dictionary handy to use, and those who are accustomed to alphabets will find locating a Chinese word in this alphabetically arranged dictionary "almost an act of second nature". Advanced learners of Chinese who have a firm command of pinyin will also benefit, especially in cases when they know how to pronounce a word but do not remember how to write it, and will be able to quickly find the character (2005: 145).

Tang suggests an improvement for future "ABC Dictionary" editions. Users who want to look up an unfamiliar character may find the layout of Stroke-Order Index and Radical Index to be "awkward, inconvenient, and time-consuming" because after looking the character up, the index gives the pinyin pronunciation instead of the page (2005: 146).

ABC Chinese–English Dictionary

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was an influential American sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. After he retired from teaching in 1976, DeFrancis was a prolific author of influential works such as "" (1984) and "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" (1989).

In DeFrancis' Acknowledgements, he says "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair", who after unsuccessful attempts to obtain financial support for the compilation of an alphabetically based Chinese–English dictionary, in 1990 organized an international group of scholars who volunteered to contribute towards compiling it. However, "agonizingly slow progress" made it apparent that a fulltime editor was necessary, and in May 1992 John DeFrancis offered to undertake the project centered at the University of Hawai'i (1996: ix).

In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".

The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).

The present dictionary has several titles:

The "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" comprises three main sections: an 18-page front matter, the 833-page body matter of alphabetically arranged entries, and 64-page back matter with nine appendices.

The front matter includes a Table of contents; Dedication to "China's Staunchest Advocates of Writing Reform"; Editor's Call to Action; Acknowledgments; Introduction with I. Distinctive Features of the Dictionary and II. Selection and Definition of Entries; and User's Guide with I. Arrangement of Entries, II. Orthography, III. Explanatory Notes and Examples, IV. Works Consulted, and V. Abbreviations (1996: i–xix).

The dictionary proper gives alphabetically arranged lexical entries and English translation equivalents, from "a* 啊'[i.e., particle] "used as phrase suffix" ① ("in enumeration") … ② ("in direct address and exclamation") … ③ ("indicating obviousness/impatience" … ④ ("for confirmation")" to "zúzūn 族尊'clan seniors" (1996: 1 and 833, usage examples omitted).

DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" claims six lexicographical distinctions.

The main source for "ABC Dictionary" entries is the 1989 edition of "Hanyu Pinyin Cihui" 汉語拼音詞汇 "Hanyu Pinyin Romanized Lexicon", a semi-official wordlist of 60,400 entries (without definitions) compiled by members of the PRC State Language Commission. Focusing upon the needs of Western students of Chinese, DeFrancis and the editors eliminated some terms and added others. Their dictionary includes many neologisms such as "dàgēdà" 大哥大 "cellular phone" or "dǎo(r)yé" 倒爷 "profiteer; speculator", as well as the modern Chinese practice of incorporating the Latin alphabet in coining Sino-alphabetic words like "BP-jī" BP机 "pager; beeper".

In contrast to most Chinese–English dictionaries, DeFrancis' emphasizes multisyllabic "cí" "words" rather than monosyllabic "zì" "characters". It only includes monosyllabic character entries that are likely to be encountered as free forms or unbound morphemes (according to the "Xiandai Hanyu Pinlü Cidian" 现代汉语频率词典 "Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese").

The "ABC Dictionary" format for entries is (1996: xiii):

Take the "dao" in Daoism for an example dictionary entry.
dào 道 ① road ② channel ③ way ④ doctrine ⑤ Daoism ⑥ line ♦'"for rivers/topics/etc." ♦'① say; speak; talk chángyán dào as the saying goes Tā shuō ~: "..." He said: "..." ② think; suppose (1996: 113)
This concise entry uses a superscript on "dào" to denote 道 as the second most commonly occurring unbound character pronounced "dào", gives six English translation equivalents, distinguishes syntactic uses as a measure word and a verb, and gives two characterless usage examples "chángyán dào" 常言道 and "Tā shuōdào" 他說道.

Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.

Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions" (Bauer 1997: 307); "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and comprehensive coverage of the colloquial language should make it a favourite of all serious students of Modem Chinese" (Jensen 1998: 144); "This excellent one-volume Chinese–English dictionary is a crowning achievement for John DeFrancis, one of the doyens of Chinese language teaching in the United States" (Sawer 2001: 224).

A common area of complaint involves the "ABC Dictionary"'s treatment of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Dictionary entries give simplified characters for headwords, and only give the traditional form upon the first appearance of each character, and in the appendices. For instance, critics say, "looking up characters in traditional form is a bit more trouble than it might be, you must use a special index" (Chung 1998: 660); and the dictionary is "clearly not designed to be used by anyone who does serious work with nonsimplified characters" (Jensen 1998: 144).

One reviewer panned the "ABC Dictionary"'s supplementary materials. For instance, saying the front matter's "uncommonly profuse" dedication and Editor's Call to Action reveal "no doubt that axes are being ground" about writing reform; the Distinctive Features of the Dictionary "reads like an abstract for a research grant application"; and describing most of the appendices as "a hodgepodge of pub quiz trivia" (Jensen 1998: 143).

Taking a contrary view, Karen Steffen Chung, professor of Chinese at National Taiwan University, found using DeFrancis' dictionary less satisfying than traditional dictionaries, where all compounds beginning with the same character are listed together under that character head entry. Giving the circular example of a hypothetical dictionary user wanting to find all the compounds beginning with "shí" 實 "to realize", which is certainly easier with a customary Chinese dictionary than with the "ABC", Chung says that the alphabetic arrangement is unfortunately "its biggest drawback", and while "this may reflect an ideal of treating Chinese primarily as a spoken rather than written language, it also goes against native habit and intuition." (1998: 660).

Scott McGinnis, professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, explains that users of the "ABC Dictionary" who are already familiar with written Chinese and dictionaries organized by character headings must "forget" what they know about the Mandarin syllabic inventory and focus strictly on the spelling. For some dictionary users, purely pinyin-dependent sequencing such as "cuānzi" 镩子 "ice pick" to "cūbào" 粗暴 "rude; rough; crude" and "nǎngshí" 曩时 "(written) in olden days; of yore" to "nánguā" 南瓜 "pumpkin" "may be at least initially confusing" (1997: 568).

Jan W. Walls, professor of Chinese language and culture at Simon Fraser University, describes some minor oversights in the dictionary such as the "dīshì 的士 taxi" entry, which might imply the borrowing came directly from English, when it actually is a loanword from Cantonese "dik si" 的士 transcribing "taxi". But this is a minor point, "merely "meizhong-buzu" 美中不足 (defined in "ABC" as "blemish in sth. otherwise perfect") that should not detract from the great value of this important work … which is quite likely to become a standard reference work for English-speaking students of Mandarin, and to remain so for quite some time." (1998: 113–114).

The expanded 2003 "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" had fewer academic reviews than the 1996 "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary".

Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).

"ABC" gives grammatical information with around 30 tags, including both parts of speech ("V." for verb) and other tags ("ID." for idiom). "CED" provides just 11 grammatical tags, while "CCD" only marks numerals and classifiers. The comprehensive grammatical tags in "ABC" are "a most valuable feature", especially for learners of Chinese, and many words have more than one grammatical function (e.g., " xuéxí" 学习 [學習]'study; learn; emulate ◆'learning"). Another useful "ABC" grammatical tag is B.F. for "bound form" (as opposed to free form words, mentioned above), but this distinction is not usually indicated in PRC dictionaries such as "CED" and "CCD" (Sawer 2004: 311).

Proper nouns receive a particularly ample treatment in "ABC" (especially compared with "CED" and "CCD"). These include people's names (e.g., some 15 beginning with the surname Lǐ 李, ranging from the famous poet Li Bai to the former PRC President Li Xiannian), names of automobiles (like "Xiàlì" 夏利 "Charade"), and many toponyms ("Xiàwēiyí" 夏威夷 "Hawaii", spelled with the ʻokina) (Sawer 2004: 312).

Tang suggests an improvement for future "ABC Dictionary" editions. Users who want to look up an unfamiliar character may find the layout of Stroke-Order Index and Radical Index to be "awkward, inconvenient, and time-consuming" because after looking the character up, the index gives the pinyin pronunciation instead of the page (2005: 146).

ABC Chinese–English Dictionary

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was an influential American sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. After he retired from teaching in 1976, DeFrancis was a prolific author of influential works such as "" (1984) and "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" (1989).

In DeFrancis' Acknowledgements, he says "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair", who after unsuccessful attempts to obtain financial support for the compilation of an alphabetically based Chinese–English dictionary, in 1990 organized an international group of scholars who volunteered to contribute towards compiling it. However, "agonizingly slow progress" made it apparent that a fulltime editor was necessary, and in May 1992 John DeFrancis offered to undertake the project centered at the University of Hawai'i (1996: ix).

In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".

The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).

The present dictionary has several titles:

The "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" comprises three main sections: an 18-page front matter, the 833-page body matter of alphabetically arranged entries, and 64-page back matter with nine appendices.

The front matter includes a Table of contents; Dedication to "China's Staunchest Advocates of Writing Reform"; Editor's Call to Action; Acknowledgments; Introduction with I. Distinctive Features of the Dictionary and II. Selection and Definition of Entries; and User's Guide with I. Arrangement of Entries, II. Orthography, III. Explanatory Notes and Examples, IV. Works Consulted, and V. Abbreviations (1996: i–xix).

The dictionary proper gives alphabetically arranged lexical entries and English translation equivalents, from "a* 啊'[i.e., particle] "used as phrase suffix" ① ("in enumeration") … ② ("in direct address and exclamation") … ③ ("indicating obviousness/impatience" … ④ ("for confirmation")" to "zúzūn 族尊'clan seniors" (1996: 1 and 833, usage examples omitted).

DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" claims six lexicographical distinctions.

The main source for "ABC Dictionary" entries is the 1989 edition of "Hanyu Pinyin Cihui" 汉語拼音詞汇 "Hanyu Pinyin Romanized Lexicon", a semi-official wordlist of 60,400 entries (without definitions) compiled by members of the PRC State Language Commission. Focusing upon the needs of Western students of Chinese, DeFrancis and the editors eliminated some terms and added others. Their dictionary includes many neologisms such as "dàgēdà" 大哥大 "cellular phone" or "dǎo(r)yé" 倒爷 "profiteer; speculator", as well as the modern Chinese practice of incorporating the Latin alphabet in coining Sino-alphabetic words like "BP-jī" BP机 "pager; beeper".

In contrast to most Chinese–English dictionaries, DeFrancis' emphasizes multisyllabic "cí" "words" rather than monosyllabic "zì" "characters". It only includes monosyllabic character entries that are likely to be encountered as free forms or unbound morphemes (according to the "Xiandai Hanyu Pinlü Cidian" 现代汉语频率词典 "Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese").

The "ABC Dictionary" format for entries is (1996: xiii):

Take the "dao" in Daoism for an example dictionary entry.
dào 道 ① road ② channel ③ way ④ doctrine ⑤ Daoism ⑥ line ♦'"for rivers/topics/etc." ♦'① say; speak; talk chángyán dào as the saying goes Tā shuō ~: "..." He said: "..." ② think; suppose (1996: 113)
This concise entry uses a superscript on "dào" to denote 道 as the second most commonly occurring unbound character pronounced "dào", gives six English translation equivalents, distinguishes syntactic uses as a measure word and a verb, and gives two characterless usage examples "chángyán dào" 常言道 and "Tā shuōdào" 他說道.

Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.

Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions" (Bauer 1997: 307); "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and comprehensive coverage of the colloquial language should make it a favourite of all serious students of Modem Chinese" (Jensen 1998: 144); "This excellent one-volume Chinese–English dictionary is a crowning achievement for John DeFrancis, one of the doyens of Chinese language teaching in the United States" (Sawer 2001: 224).

A common area of complaint involves the "ABC Dictionary"'s treatment of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Dictionary entries give simplified characters for headwords, and only give the traditional form upon the first appearance of each character, and in the appendices. For instance, critics say, "looking up characters in traditional form is a bit more trouble than it might be, you must use a special index" (Chung 1998: 660); and the dictionary is "clearly not designed to be used by anyone who does serious work with nonsimplified characters" (Jensen 1998: 144).

One reviewer panned the "ABC Dictionary"'s supplementary materials. For instance, saying the front matter's "uncommonly profuse" dedication and Editor's Call to Action reveal "no doubt that axes are being ground" about writing reform; the Distinctive Features of the Dictionary "reads like an abstract for a research grant application"; and describing most of the appendices as "a hodgepodge of pub quiz trivia" (Jensen 1998: 143).

Taking a contrary view, Karen Steffen Chung, professor of Chinese at National Taiwan University, found using DeFrancis' dictionary less satisfying than traditional dictionaries, where all compounds beginning with the same character are listed together under that character head entry. Giving the circular example of a hypothetical dictionary user wanting to find all the compounds beginning with "shí" 實 "to realize", which is certainly easier with a customary Chinese dictionary than with the "ABC", Chung says that the alphabetic arrangement is unfortunately "its biggest drawback", and while "this may reflect an ideal of treating Chinese primarily as a spoken rather than written language, it also goes against native habit and intuition." (1998: 660).

Scott McGinnis, professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, explains that users of the "ABC Dictionary" who are already familiar with written Chinese and dictionaries organized by character headings must "forget" what they know about the Mandarin syllabic inventory and focus strictly on the spelling. For some dictionary users, purely pinyin-dependent sequencing such as "cuānzi" 镩子 "ice pick" to "cūbào" 粗暴 "rude; rough; crude" and "nǎngshí" 曩时 "(written) in olden days; of yore" to "nánguā" 南瓜 "pumpkin" "may be at least initially confusing" (1997: 568).

Jan W. Walls, professor of Chinese language and culture at Simon Fraser University, describes some minor oversights in the dictionary such as the "dīshì 的士 taxi" entry, which might imply the borrowing came directly from English, when it actually is a loanword from Cantonese "dik si" 的士 transcribing "taxi". But this is a minor point, "merely "meizhong-buzu" 美中不足 (defined in "ABC" as "blemish in sth. otherwise perfect") that should not detract from the great value of this important work … which is quite likely to become a standard reference work for English-speaking students of Mandarin, and to remain so for quite some time." (1998: 113–114).

The expanded 2003 "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" had fewer academic reviews than the 1996 "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary".

Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).

"ABC" gives grammatical information with around 30 tags, including both parts of speech ("V." for verb) and other tags ("ID." for idiom). "CED" provides just 11 grammatical tags, while "CCD" only marks numerals and classifiers. The comprehensive grammatical tags in "ABC" are "a most valuable feature", especially for learners of Chinese, and many words have more than one grammatical function (e.g., " xuéxí" 学习 [學習]'study; learn; emulate ◆'learning"). Another useful "ABC" grammatical tag is B.F. for "bound form" (as opposed to free form words, mentioned above), but this distinction is not usually indicated in PRC dictionaries such as "CED" and "CCD" (Sawer 2004: 311).

Proper nouns receive a particularly ample treatment in "ABC" (especially compared with "CED" and "CCD"). These include people's names (e.g., some 15 beginning with the surname Lǐ 李, ranging from the famous poet Li Bai to the former PRC President Li Xiannian), names of automobiles (like "Xiàlì" 夏利 "Charade"), and many toponyms ("Xiàwēiyí" 夏威夷 "Hawaii", spelled with the ʻokina) (Sawer 2004: 312).

Tang suggests an improvement for future "ABC Dictionary" editions. Users who want to look up an unfamiliar character may find the layout of Stroke-Order Index and Radical Index to be "awkward, inconvenient, and time-consuming" because after looking the character up, the index gives the pinyin pronunciation instead of the page (2005: 146).

ABC Chinese–English Dictionary

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was an influential American sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. After he retired from teaching in 1976, DeFrancis was a prolific author of influential works such as "" (1984) and "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" (1989).

In DeFrancis' Acknowledgements, he says "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair", who after unsuccessful attempts to obtain financial support for the compilation of an alphabetically based Chinese–English dictionary, in 1990 organized an international group of scholars who volunteered to contribute towards compiling it. However, "agonizingly slow progress" made it apparent that a fulltime editor was necessary, and in May 1992 John DeFrancis offered to undertake the project centered at the University of Hawai'i (1996: ix).

In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".

The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).

The present dictionary has several titles:

The "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" comprises three main sections: an 18-page front matter, the 833-page body matter of alphabetically arranged entries, and 64-page back matter with nine appendices.

The front matter includes a Table of contents; Dedication to "China's Staunchest Advocates of Writing Reform"; Editor's Call to Action; Acknowledgments; Introduction with I. Distinctive Features of the Dictionary and II. Selection and Definition of Entries; and User's Guide with I. Arrangement of Entries, II. Orthography, III. Explanatory Notes and Examples, IV. Works Consulted, and V. Abbreviations (1996: i–xix).

The dictionary proper gives alphabetically arranged lexical entries and English translation equivalents, from "a* 啊'[i.e., particle] "used as phrase suffix" ① ("in enumeration") … ② ("in direct address and exclamation") … ③ ("indicating obviousness/impatience" … ④ ("for confirmation")" to "zúzūn 族尊'clan seniors" (1996: 1 and 833, usage examples omitted).

DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" claims six lexicographical distinctions.

The main source for "ABC Dictionary" entries is the 1989 edition of "Hanyu Pinyin Cihui" 汉語拼音詞汇 "Hanyu Pinyin Romanized Lexicon", a semi-official wordlist of 60,400 entries (without definitions) compiled by members of the PRC State Language Commission. Focusing upon the needs of Western students of Chinese, DeFrancis and the editors eliminated some terms and added others. Their dictionary includes many neologisms such as "dàgēdà" 大哥大 "cellular phone" or "dǎo(r)yé" 倒爷 "profiteer; speculator", as well as the modern Chinese practice of incorporating the Latin alphabet in coining Sino-alphabetic words like "BP-jī" BP机 "pager; beeper".

In contrast to most Chinese–English dictionaries, DeFrancis' emphasizes multisyllabic "cí" "words" rather than monosyllabic "zì" "characters". It only includes monosyllabic character entries that are likely to be encountered as free forms or unbound morphemes (according to the "Xiandai Hanyu Pinlü Cidian" 现代汉语频率词典 "Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese").

The "ABC Dictionary" format for entries is (1996: xiii):

Take the "dao" in Daoism for an example dictionary entry.
dào 道 ① road ② channel ③ way ④ doctrine ⑤ Daoism ⑥ line ♦'"for rivers/topics/etc." ♦'① say; speak; talk chángyán dào as the saying goes Tā shuō ~: "..." He said: "..." ② think; suppose (1996: 113)
This concise entry uses a superscript on "dào" to denote 道 as the second most commonly occurring unbound character pronounced "dào", gives six English translation equivalents, distinguishes syntactic uses as a measure word and a verb, and gives two characterless usage examples "chángyán dào" 常言道 and "Tā shuōdào" 他說道.

Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.

Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions" (Bauer 1997: 307); "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and comprehensive coverage of the colloquial language should make it a favourite of all serious students of Modem Chinese" (Jensen 1998: 144); "This excellent one-volume Chinese–English dictionary is a crowning achievement for John DeFrancis, one of the doyens of Chinese language teaching in the United States" (Sawer 2001: 224).

A common area of complaint involves the "ABC Dictionary"'s treatment of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Dictionary entries give simplified characters for headwords, and only give the traditional form upon the first appearance of each character, and in the appendices. For instance, critics say, "looking up characters in traditional form is a bit more trouble than it might be, you must use a special index" (Chung 1998: 660); and the dictionary is "clearly not designed to be used by anyone who does serious work with nonsimplified characters" (Jensen 1998: 144).

One reviewer panned the "ABC Dictionary"'s supplementary materials. For instance, saying the front matter's "uncommonly profuse" dedication and Editor's Call to Action reveal "no doubt that axes are being ground" about writing reform; the Distinctive Features of the Dictionary "reads like an abstract for a research grant application"; and describing most of the appendices as "a hodgepodge of pub quiz trivia" (Jensen 1998: 143).

Taking a contrary view, Karen Steffen Chung, professor of Chinese at National Taiwan University, found using DeFrancis' dictionary less satisfying than traditional dictionaries, where all compounds beginning with the same character are listed together under that character head entry. Giving the circular example of a hypothetical dictionary user wanting to find all the compounds beginning with "shí" 實 "to realize", which is certainly easier with a customary Chinese dictionary than with the "ABC", Chung says that the alphabetic arrangement is unfortunately "its biggest drawback", and while "this may reflect an ideal of treating Chinese primarily as a spoken rather than written language, it also goes against native habit and intuition." (1998: 660).

Scott McGinnis, professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, explains that users of the "ABC Dictionary" who are already familiar with written Chinese and dictionaries organized by character headings must "forget" what they know about the Mandarin syllabic inventory and focus strictly on the spelling. For some dictionary users, purely pinyin-dependent sequencing such as "cuānzi" 镩子 "ice pick" to "cūbào" 粗暴 "rude; rough; crude" and "nǎngshí" 曩时 "(written) in olden days; of yore" to "nánguā" 南瓜 "pumpkin" "may be at least initially confusing" (1997: 568).

Jan W. Walls, professor of Chinese language and culture at Simon Fraser University, describes some minor oversights in the dictionary such as the "dīshì 的士 taxi" entry, which might imply the borrowing came directly from English, when it actually is a loanword from Cantonese "dik si" 的士 transcribing "taxi". But this is a minor point, "merely "meizhong-buzu" 美中不足 (defined in "ABC" as "blemish in sth. otherwise perfect") that should not detract from the great value of this important work … which is quite likely to become a standard reference work for English-speaking students of Mandarin, and to remain so for quite some time." (1998: 113–114).

The expanded 2003 "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" had fewer academic reviews than the 1996 "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary".

Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).

"ABC" gives grammatical information with around 30 tags, including both parts of speech ("V." for verb) and other tags ("ID." for idiom). "CED" provides just 11 grammatical tags, while "CCD" only marks numerals and classifiers. The comprehensive grammatical tags in "ABC" are "a most valuable feature", especially for learners of Chinese, and many words have more than one grammatical function (e.g., " xuéxí" 学习 [學習]'study; learn; emulate ◆'learning"). Another useful "ABC" grammatical tag is B.F. for "bound form" (as opposed to free form words, mentioned above), but this distinction is not usually indicated in PRC dictionaries such as "CED" and "CCD" (Sawer 2004: 311).

Proper nouns receive a particularly ample treatment in "ABC" (especially compared with "CED" and "CCD"). These include people's names (e.g., some 15 beginning with the surname Lǐ 李, ranging from the famous poet Li Bai to the former PRC President Li Xiannian), names of automobiles (like "Xiàlì" 夏利 "Charade"), and many toponyms ("Xiàwēiyí" 夏威夷 "Hawaii", spelled with the ʻokina) (Sawer 2004: 312).

Tang suggests an improvement for future "ABC Dictionary" editions. Users who want to look up an unfamiliar character may find the layout of Stroke-Order Index and Radical Index to be "awkward, inconvenient, and time-consuming" because after looking the character up, the index gives the pinyin pronunciation instead of the page (2005: 146).

ABC Chinese–English Dictionary

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was an influential American sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. After he retired from teaching in 1976, DeFrancis was a prolific author of influential works such as "" (1984) and "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" (1989).

In DeFrancis' Acknowledgements, he says "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair", who after unsuccessful attempts to obtain financial support for the compilation of an alphabetically based Chinese–English dictionary, in 1990 organized an international group of scholars who volunteered to contribute towards compiling it. However, "agonizingly slow progress" made it apparent that a fulltime editor was necessary, and in May 1992 John DeFrancis offered to undertake the project centered at the University of Hawai'i (1996: ix).

Along with Prof. DeFrancis overseeing the general planning and supervision of the project as well as its detailed operations, a volunteer team of some 50 contributors – including academics, Chinese language teachers, students, lexicographers, and computer consultants – were involved in the myriad tasks of processing dictionary entries, such as defining, inputting, checking, and proofreading. The University of Hawai'i Press published the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" in September 1996. UHP republished the original paperback "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary", which had a total 916 pages and was 23 cm. high, into the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary: Pocket Edition" (1999, 16 cm.) and hardback "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary: Desk Reference Edition" (2000, 23 cm.).

In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".

The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).

The present dictionary has several titles:

The "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" comprises three main sections: an 18-page front matter, the 833-page body matter of alphabetically arranged entries, and 64-page back matter with nine appendices.

The front matter includes a Table of contents; Dedication to "China's Staunchest Advocates of Writing Reform"; Editor's Call to Action; Acknowledgments; Introduction with I. Distinctive Features of the Dictionary and II. Selection and Definition of Entries; and User's Guide with I. Arrangement of Entries, II. Orthography, III. Explanatory Notes and Examples, IV. Works Consulted, and V. Abbreviations (1996: i–xix).

The dictionary proper gives alphabetically arranged lexical entries and English translation equivalents, from "a* 啊'[i.e., particle] "used as phrase suffix" ① ("in enumeration") … ② ("in direct address and exclamation") … ③ ("indicating obviousness/impatience" … ④ ("for confirmation")" to "zúzūn 族尊'clan seniors" (1996: 1 and 833, usage examples omitted).

DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" claims six lexicographical distinctions.

The main source for "ABC Dictionary" entries is the 1989 edition of "Hanyu Pinyin Cihui" 汉語拼音詞汇 "Hanyu Pinyin Romanized Lexicon", a semi-official wordlist of 60,400 entries (without definitions) compiled by members of the PRC State Language Commission. Focusing upon the needs of Western students of Chinese, DeFrancis and the editors eliminated some terms and added others. Their dictionary includes many neologisms such as "dàgēdà" 大哥大 "cellular phone" or "dǎo(r)yé" 倒爷 "profiteer; speculator", as well as the modern Chinese practice of incorporating the Latin alphabet in coining Sino-alphabetic words like "BP-jī" BP机 "pager; beeper".

In contrast to most Chinese–English dictionaries, DeFrancis' emphasizes multisyllabic "cí" "words" rather than monosyllabic "zì" "characters". It only includes monosyllabic character entries that are likely to be encountered as free forms or unbound morphemes (according to the "Xiandai Hanyu Pinlü Cidian" 现代汉语频率词典 "Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese").

The "ABC Dictionary" format for entries is (1996: xiii):

Take the "dao" in Daoism for an example dictionary entry.
dào 道 ① road ② channel ③ way ④ doctrine ⑤ Daoism ⑥ line ♦'"for rivers/topics/etc." ♦'① say; speak; talk chángyán dào as the saying goes Tā shuō ~: "..." He said: "..." ② think; suppose (1996: 113)
This concise entry uses a superscript on "dào" to denote 道 as the second most commonly occurring unbound character pronounced "dào", gives six English translation equivalents, distinguishes syntactic uses as a measure word and a verb, and gives two characterless usage examples "chángyán dào" 常言道 and "Tā shuōdào" 他說道.

Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.

Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions" (Bauer 1997: 307); "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and comprehensive coverage of the colloquial language should make it a favourite of all serious students of Modem Chinese" (Jensen 1998: 144); "This excellent one-volume Chinese–English dictionary is a crowning achievement for John DeFrancis, one of the doyens of Chinese language teaching in the United States" (Sawer 2001: 224).

A common area of complaint involves the "ABC Dictionary"'s treatment of traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Dictionary entries give simplified characters for headwords, and only give the traditional form upon the first appearance of each character, and in the appendices. For instance, critics say, "looking up characters in traditional form is a bit more trouble than it might be, you must use a special index" (Chung 1998: 660); and the dictionary is "clearly not designed to be used by anyone who does serious work with nonsimplified characters" (Jensen 1998: 144).

One reviewer panned the "ABC Dictionary"'s supplementary materials. For instance, saying the front matter's "uncommonly profuse" dedication and Editor's Call to Action reveal "no doubt that axes are being ground" about writing reform; the Distinctive Features of the Dictionary "reads like an abstract for a research grant application"; and describing most of the appendices as "a hodgepodge of pub quiz trivia" (Jensen 1998: 143).

Taking a contrary view, Karen Steffen Chung, professor of Chinese at National Taiwan University, found using DeFrancis' dictionary less satisfying than traditional dictionaries, where all compounds beginning with the same character are listed together under that character head entry. Giving the circular example of a hypothetical dictionary user wanting to find all the compounds beginning with "shí" 實 "to realize", which is certainly easier with a customary Chinese dictionary than with the "ABC", Chung says that the alphabetic arrangement is unfortunately "its biggest drawback", and while "this may reflect an ideal of treating Chinese primarily as a spoken rather than written language, it also goes against native habit and intuition." (1998: 660).

Scott McGinnis, professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, explains that users of the "ABC Dictionary" who are already familiar with written Chinese and dictionaries organized by character headings must "forget" what they know about the Mandarin syllabic inventory and focus strictly on the spelling. For some dictionary users, purely pinyin-dependent sequencing such as "cuānzi" 镩子 "ice pick" to "cūbào" 粗暴 "rude; rough; crude" and "nǎngshí" 曩时 "(written) in olden days; of yore" to "nánguā" 南瓜 "pumpkin" "may be at least initially confusing" (1997: 568).

Jan W. Walls, professor of Chinese language and culture at Simon Fraser University, describes some minor oversights in the dictionary such as the "dīshì 的士 taxi" entry, which might imply the borrowing came directly from English, when it actually is a loanword from Cantonese "dik si" 的士 transcribing "taxi". But this is a minor point, "merely "meizhong-buzu" 美中不足 (defined in "ABC" as "blemish in sth. otherwise perfect") that should not detract from the great value of this important work … which is quite likely to become a standard reference work for English-speaking students of Mandarin, and to remain so for quite some time." (1998: 113–114).

The expanded 2003 "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" had fewer academic reviews than the 1996 "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary".

Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).

"ABC" gives grammatical information with around 30 tags, including both parts of speech ("V." for verb) and other tags ("ID." for idiom). "CED" provides just 11 grammatical tags, while "CCD" only marks numerals and classifiers. The comprehensive grammatical tags in "ABC" are "a most valuable feature", especially for learners of Chinese, and many words have more than one grammatical function (e.g., " xuéxí" 学习 [學習]'study; learn; emulate ◆'learning"). Another useful "ABC" grammatical tag is B.F. for "bound form" (as opposed to free form words, mentioned above), but this distinction is not usually indicated in PRC dictionaries such as "CED" and "CCD" (Sawer 2004: 311).

Proper nouns receive a particularly ample treatment in "ABC" (especially compared with "CED" and "CCD"). These include people's names (e.g., some 15 beginning with the surname Lǐ 李, ranging from the famous poet Li Bai to the former PRC President Li Xiannian), names of automobiles (like "Xiàlì" 夏利 "Charade"), and many toponyms ("Xiàwēiyí" 夏威夷 "Hawaii", spelled with the ʻokina) (Sawer 2004: 312).

Tang suggests an improvement for future "ABC Dictionary" editions. Users who want to look up an unfamiliar character may find the layout of Stroke-Order Index and Radical Index to be "awkward, inconvenient, and time-consuming" because after looking the character up, the index gives the pinyin pronunciation instead of the page (2005: 146).

Although the War Department dictionary was never widely distributed or used, it affected Chao's and Yang's "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese", and served as the model for two well-known dictionaries. Yale University's Institute of Far Eastern Languages published a revised edition "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" (1966), and Fred Fangyu Wang published a two-volume "Mandarin Chinese dictionary", Chinese-English (1967) and English-Chinese (1971). With these dictionaries, "American efforts in Chinese lexicography effectively ceased" (Norman 1988: 176)—until the "ABC Chinese-English Dictionary" (1996).

Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese

The Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1947), which was compiled by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang, made numerous important lexicographic innovations. It was the first Chinese dictionary specifically for spoken Chinese words rather than for written Chinese characters, and one of the first to mark characters for being "free" or "bound" morphemes according to whether or not they can stand alone as a complete and independent utterance.

The compilers of the "Concise Dictionary of Chinese", the linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982) and the historian Yang Lien-sheng (1914-1990), were famous Chinese-American scholars who worked in Harvard University wartime Chinese language programs for the War Department. Chao was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1941 to 1946, while Yang entered the graduate program in 1940, and received an M.A. in 1942 and Ph.D. in 1946.

At the beginning of World War II, the shortage of Chinese and Japanese bilingual dictionaries became an urgent matter for English-speaking Allies. The Harvard–Yenching Institute said the need for Chinese dictionaries in America had "grown from chronic to acute", and selected two "practical dictionaries" to revise and reprint—without either author's permission—for "the immediate demands of American students" (Mathews 1943: v). Both photolithographic reproductions were retitled: "The Five Thousand Dictionary" (5th ed., 1940) became "Fenn's Chinese-English Pocket-Dictionary" (1942) and "" (1931) became "Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary" (1943). Y. R. Chao contributed to both these reprints. He revised the introduction and wrote the Standards of Pronunciation, Styles of Pronunciation, and Tones sections for "Fenn's" (1942: xxii-xxiv), and wrote the Introduction on Pronunciation for "Mathews"' (1943: ix-xvii).

Yuen Ren Chao and Lien-sheng Yang divided the lexicographical work. Yang compiled the preliminary list of entries, partially drafted the definitions, served both as informant and as grammarian on Beijing dialect, and wrote the characters. Chao wrote most of the definitions, added pronunciations from regional varieties of Chinese, and wrote the front matter and the appendices (1947: vii). Chao and Yang finished compiling their "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" in 1945, the same year when the War Department published the anonymous "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese: Chinese-English, English-Chinese". Although the 847-page "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" is large, it contains relatively few lexical items, approximately 2,500 English-Chinese head entries in 500 pages and 5,000 Chinese-English ones in 300 pages (1945: 1).

The Chinese-English section's head entries are not single characters, as in traditional Chinese dictionaries, but monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, which are alphabetically collated using a newly devised system for romanizing Chinese (which became the prototype for Yale romanization). "This represents a radical departure from all earlier Chinese-English dictionaries, which were primarily dictionaries of Chinese characters ("hànzi") and not of the spoken language as such" (Norman 1988: 175). Although the Chinese-English section gives characters for head entries, they are treated as secondary. The "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" records authentic colloquial pronunciation, and its chief function is to show a user how to employ the entries in spoken Chinese—in contrast, the chief function of previous bilingual dictionaries is to enable a user to decode written texts. Most entries provide one or more usage examples from colloquial speech. This dictionary classifies words into twelve complex grammatical categories: adjective (A), demonstrative (Dem), adverb (H), intransitive verb (I), conjunction (J), coverb (K), measure word (M), noun (N), numeral (Num), pronoun (Pron), resultative compound (RC) and transitive verb (V).

The "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese"'s English-Chinese section averages around 5 entries per page, compared to around 18 per page in the Chinese-English section. Some English-Chinese entries are quite elaborate, providing multiple Chinese translation equivalents and usage examples illustrating various semantic nuances of the English word.

The influence of American structural linguistics, which shifted interest from the written to the spoken language, is evident in both the War Department's "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" (1945) and Chao's and Yang's "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" (1947). "In both dictionaries we can observe the authors attempting not just to provide their Chinese entries with English equivalents but to demonstrate through grammatical categorization and examples how they are actually used" (Norman 1988: 175).

The "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" comprises approximately 5,000 single-character head entries, collated by radical-and-stroke and numbered according to the 214 Kangxi radicals. The twelve most frequent radicals are given at the bottom of the pages for the dictionary user to memorize. "To insure further the finding of the characters, the authors have entered each character under all its apparently possible radicals and made a cross reference to the main entry" (1947: xxvi). For instance, 魯 "luu" is entered under radical 72 曰 "sun", with the note "See Rad. 195 魚 ["fish"]." The "Concise Dictionary" includes the popular and cursive forms of many characters, as well as the Suzhou numerals (e.g., "〢 "ell" Soochow numeral for '2', used in trade"), and the Bopomofo symbols ("ㄎ "ke" National Phonetic letter for the aspirated initial "k""), which had never been included in a Chinese dictionary, thus removing "one source of bewilderment for the foreign student of Chinese" (Luo 1947: 434).

The "Concise Dictionary" has "many elaborate features to help the user study the refinements of spoken Chinese" (Dunn 1977: 78). Chao's introduction lists eight unique features not found in previous comparable Chinese-English dictionaries such as Fenn's and Mathews' (1947: v-vi).

(1) The grammatical function of each word is distinguished according to whether it is free (F) or bound (B). With the exception of measure words or Chinese classifiers, called "auxiliary nouns" (AN), the dictionary generally did not indicate syntactic part of speech, called "word classes". Chao explains, "The same word, as a noun, means one thing; as an auxiliary noun (AN) something else, as a verb something else again. This is not a matter of inference, as those who say that Chinese has no parts of speech assume, but a matter of individual facts." (1947: v). The dictionary's English translation equivalents usually can clarify Chinese part of speech; if 吃 "chy" ["chī"] is defined by the English verb "to eat", then it is itself also a verb. word classes are only specified in cases of ambiguity; 脂肪 "jyfang" ["zhīfáng"] "fat" is marked "n." "noun" since English "fat" can also be an adjective (Norman 1988: 174). The dictionary lists other specialized grammatical categories (1947: xxvii-xxxi), for instance, "auxiliary nouns proper" and "quasi-auxiliary nouns", and introduces for the first time in a Chinese dictionary "many new ideas about the linguistic structure of Chinese, such as the four types of verbal complements": the "pre-transitive," "verb-object construction", "possessive object," and "impersonal verb-object compound"" (Luo 1947: 432-433).

(2) The stylistic register or usage class of each entry is either marked by an abbreviation (e.g., "derog.", "honorif.", "poet.") or implied in the translation (as 殆 "well-nigh," but 差不多 "almost"), in order to "channel the student's efforts in using the language to more profitable directions".

(3) The "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" is the first Chinese dictionary to give detailed descriptions of particles and interjections. For example, 了 has three entries:

(4) Dictionary entries give morphological derivations, words created by adding affixes (e.g., 兒 "erl" ["r"], the "syllabic diminutive suffix, frequently used in verse") or by reduplication (單 "dan" ["dān"] single … 單單 "(this) only, alone; (this) of all things").

(5) Entries also give collocative words that are frequently used together (e.g., "棋 "chyi" ["qí"] "chess" … 下棋 "to play chess or "go"") and common antonyms. This dictionary "includes a great number of meanings even of well-known words which so far have not been noted in any other dictionary" (Simon 1949: 137).

(6) The Gwoyeu Romatzyh "National Romanization" system, which Y.R. Chao co-created and popularized, is used for pronunciation of main entries, along with usual Wade-Giles orthography given in parentheses. Appendix 1, Part 2, is a table of concordance for these two systems. Tonal spelling of the four tones is the primary advantage of National Romanization, for instance, "dau" (1st tone), "daur" (2nd), "dao" (3rd), and "daw" (4th tone), corresponding to pinyin "dāo", "dáo", "dǎo", and "dào". The neutral tone is indicated by a dot before the atonal syllable.

(7) Romanizations incorporate superscripts and other symbols to denote the historical features of Middle Chinese pronunciation and modern pronunciation in varieties of Chinese, often misleadingly called "dialects". For examples, a subscribed dot under an initial (恤 "ṣhiuh" [xù] "to pity, to give relief to") makes it possible for students interested in Peking opera to distinguish 尖 "sharp" dental consonants from 圓 "rounded" palatal consonants, and a superscript indicates Cantonese has a final "-p" checked tone and Wu Chinese has a glottal stop (Luo 1947: 433).

(8) All entries "are treated as morphemes, or monosyllabic meaningful spoken words", whether bound morphemes or free morphemes, rather than as characters. Chao gives a chemical analogy to differentiate between "zìdiǎn" 字典 "character dictionaries" and "cídiǎn" 辭典 "word dictionaries".
In China, dictionaries are divided into 字典 and 詞典, the former giving only single characters, which may be compared with chemical elements, and the latter compounds and phrases, like chemical compounds. To pursue the chemical analogy one step further, compounds are so numerous that they cannot all be included except in a much more comprehensive work. We can do more than merely list the elements and their atomic weights. We can classify their affinities, their electric polarity, indicate whether they can be ionized, and give such information as to enable us to predict more compounds than can be listed. Thus by giving the morphemes of the language properly analyzed, indicating whether they are bound or free, the attempt has been made to give the equivalent of a dictionary of compounds within the space of a dictionary of single words." (1947: vi)
By treating all entries as bound or free morphemes rather than as characters, Chao and Yang have made an attempt to give the equivalent of a dictionary of compounds within the space of a dictionary of single words (Luo 1947: 433).

The dictionary's spine has English ""Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" / Chao and Yang" and the front cover has equivalent Chinese "國語字典 ["Guóyǔ zìdiǎn", "Standard Chinese Dictionary"] / 趙元任 / 楊聯陞 / 合編" ["Zhào Yuánrèn, Yáng Liánshēng, co-editors"]. The title page has both English ""Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" / By Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang" and the same Chinese.

The Chinese character 道 (composed of radical 162 辶 "walk" and a "shǒu" 首 "head" phonetic) for "dào" "way; path; say; the Dao" or "dǎo" "guide; lead; instruct" makes a good sample entry for illustrating a dictionary because it has two pronunciations and complex semantics. Chao's and Yang's dictionary entry gives detailed syntactic and pragmatic information, but fails to note the pronunciation "dǎo" 道 that is a variant Chinese character for "dǎo" 導 (with radical 41 寸 "thumb") "to lead, to guide", which they do enter (1947: 64).
道 d̠aw. (tao). "B" way, reason, principle, "Tao" 道.理; "-l" a road "AN" 條, 個; "AN" a course (of food); "-l", "tz" a streak "AN" a streak "-l"; "F" to say (introducing a direct quotation: novel style); "B-" to say (polite words), "as" 道喜 "v-o" 'to congratulate,' 道謝 "v-o" 'to give thanks.' 有道 "used at the end of the salutation in writing to a prominent scholar"; 沒道.理 unreasonable; mean; rude. (1947: 218)
First, this 道 entry glosses pronunciation with National Romanization "d̠aw" and Wade-Giles "tao". The underscored "d̠" consonant indicates a voiced initial in Wu and a lower register tone in Cantonese. Second, it gives English translation equivalents for the bound word ("B") "dàoli" 道理, with the dot before 理 denoting neutral tone "li", and the subscript 96 meaning radical 96 玉 "jade" where a dictionary user can find the character 理 "lii" listed under 96.7, with 7 being the number of strokes in the "lǐ" 里 phonetic. Third, it gives the colloquial term "dàor" 道兒 "road" with "-l" indicating the word plus the diminutive retroflex suffix "-r" 兒, counted with "tiáo" 條 "measure word for long, narrow things" ("AN" abbreviates "auxiliary noun"). Fourth, the entry notes that 道 itself is used as a measure word for courses during a meal. Fifth, "dàor" 道兒 or "dàozi" 道子 ("tz" denotes the noun suffix 子) can mean "streak", counted with "tiáo" 條 or "ge" 個 "general measure word". Sixth, "dàor" 道兒 can also be used as a measure word for streaks. Seventh, the free word ("F") "dào" 道 "dao" means "to say". Eighth, it also means "to say (polite words)" in bound terms such as "dàoxǐ" 道喜 (subscript 30 denotes radical 30 口 "mouth"), "dàoxiè" 道謝, and "yǒudào" 有道. Ninth, the entry gives the bound word "méi dàoli" 沒道理. Chao's and Yang's brief 道 entry is packed with linguistic information for users.

Most, if not all, reviewers have praised the "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese", while some have been critical. The co-author Lien-Sheng Yang responded to DeFrancis' and Simon's reviews in a 1949 article about free and bound morphemes in Chinese.

The Chinese linguist Luo Changpei (1947: 432) describes the dictionary as "unprecedented in the history of Chinese-European lexicography since its beginnings" in the early 17th century. Luo lists three unique features of the dictionary, combining six of the eight given by Chao (above); the first combines (1) and (3), the second (2), (7), (8), and the third is (6). Luo (1947: 435-436) lists 15 corrections or suggestions, 9 of which are included in later editions of the dictionary, under Corrections and Additions (1957: x)

The American linguist and lexicographer John DeFrancis described the "Concise Dictionary" as "a landmark notable for its presentation of a great deal of extremely valuable information—grammatical, phonetic, dialectical, and otherwise" (1948: 447).

DeFrancis suggests that Chao and Yang have been "unduly influenced by the ideographs and the myths of Chinese monosyllabism" (1948: 447). Although the dictionary title has "Spoken Chinese", the authors approach the subject through characters rather than through speech. Using data from a 10-page sample, DeFrancis disproves Chao's contention that with "very few exceptions" Chinese morphemes are "for the most part monosyllabic" (1947: vi). The sample dictionary entries marked as "literary" (L), "comparable to "yclept" in English and hence not really belonging in a dictionary of spoken Chinese", amount to 16% of the total entries. (Yclept is an archaic or humorous word meaning "called; named".
Of the entries which really represent spoken forms, no more than 29 per cent have been classified by the authors as Free, the only category which is generally accepted as designating a word in English and other languages. But not all the remaining 71 per cent are classified as Bound forms of the type "er" in "banker" or "sender". Only 49 per cent are of this type of meaningful syllables without independent life. The remaining 22 per cent, represented by "shan" and "hu" in "shanhu", "coral," are of a type which have no more meaning or independence than do "cor" and "al" in the English equivalent. (1948: 448)
DeFrancis proposes that the category of Bound syllables (not "words") should be divided into two groups: "meaningless bound syllables" (like "shan" and "hu" in "shanhu" 珊瑚 "coral") and "meaningful bound syllables" (like "fu" "father" and "mu" "mother" in "fumu" 父母 "parents"). "The former are fully bound (occurring in only one word), and the latter are semibound (occurring in more than one word)." DeFrancis concludes that the contributions of scholars like Dr. Chao, "give hope that lexicographers, if they can concentrate on Chinese speech and not be misled by the ideographic writing, will eventually succeed in compiling a real dictionary of the Chinese spoken language." (1948: 448).

In response to DeFrancis' review, Lien-sheng Yang states that comparing the dictionary entries designated as literary to "yclept" in English is "misleading, because the latter is an archaic word, whereas the former are still used in modern Spoken Chinese" (1949: 463). Yang says DeFrancis' suggestion of differentiating "meaningless bound syllables" and "meaningful bound syllables" appears interesting but unfortunately it involves three difficulties. First, since the word "meaning" is ambiguous, a linguist has to define "meaningful" and "meaningless" and ascertain whether all native-speaker informants agree. Second, a linguist needs to consider differences in the informants' background and education, "One syllable which is meaningful to one may be meaningless to another" (1949: 463). Third, the identification of meaningful and meaningless syllables with those occurring in more than one word and those occurring in only one "is doubtful". Taking the example of "shan" and "hu" in "shanhu" "coral", Yang notes both characters are used in other compounds, namely, "shanshan" 珊珊 "tinkling sound (of ornaments)" and "hulian" 瑚璉 "two types of ritual vessels" (1949: 464).

The German sinologist Walter Simon says the "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" is a "definite advance on our knowledge of the Chinese language" and calls it a "very important lexicographical contribution" from which "students cannot fail to derive great benefit" (1949: 137). Simon says
[O]ne can readily see that a dictionary which notes the alternatives "free" or "bound" in the case of each single character, is a mine of information which may lend itself to very important subsequent research. Questions like the following come to the mind at once. "How many of the characters included in the dictionary occur only 'free' or only 'bound', how many occur with the suffix –"tz" or –"l", what is the distribution if we proceed to grouping words according to their meanings (e.g., parts of the body)? Are practically all verbs free and all nouns 'bound', etc., etc.?" (1949: 137)
Quoting this remark, Yang says, "These are good questions. The last one is particularly suggestive, because it leads to the question whether there are free and bound parts of speech." (1949: 465).

Yu-Ju Chih, a teacher and developer of Chinese language textbooks, says that unlike almost all the commonly used Chinese-English dictionaries that are geared primarily to reading Chinese texts, the "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" is the "only one of its kind available to the public" (1967: 108).