ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary (review)

This excellent dictionary is an expansion of DeFrancis 1996. In my review of the latter (Sawer 2001) I described it as a "crowning achievement" for the editor. This new volume adds a higher layer to John DeFrancis' crown. It is the fruit of seven years of work by a team led by the veteran American sinologist (born 1911). The team included twenty associates—American, Chinese, and Australian citizens of Chinese and non-Chinese ethnicity.

The "genealogy" of influential general-purpose Chinese-English dictionaries in the last seventy-five years reaches back to Mathews 1931, published in Shanghai. It includes a series of works published in the United States: Mathews 1943; War Department 1945 and its revision, IFEL 1966; Chao and Yang 1947; Wang 1967 (for which DeFrancis was a consultant); DeFrancis 1996; and the present work, DeFrancis 2003 (ABC for short). This genealogy also includes the dictionary by the well-known literary figure Lin Yutang (1895-1976), published in Hong Kong (Lin 1972), and other influential works such as Wu Jongrong 1978 and its revision, Wei 1994 (published in Beijing); Wu Guanghua 1993 (published in Shanghai; CED for short); and CASSIL 2002 (published in Beijing; CCD for short).

CCD is the bilingual revised version of the highly authoritative monolingual Chinese dictionaries CASSIL 1978 and CASSIL 1996, both published in Beijing. Apart from Mathews (an English missionary), the team-members behind all these dictionaries have mainly been Chinese and American scholars. Let me here single out for special mention the noted linguists Y. R. Chao (1892-1982)—who not only co-authored Chao and Yang 1947 but also helped with the revision work leading to Mathews 1943 and to IFEL 1966—and Lü Shuxiang (1904-1998), who was the first Editor-in-Chief of CASSIL 1978.

In discussing ABC, I make comparisons between it and two other very good Chinese-English dictionaries from the preceding decade, namely CED (Wu Guanghua 1993) and CCD (CASSIL 2002). An important general distinction to make first is that both CED and CCD are aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning/using English, while ABC is aimed more at learners/users of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). Another general point is that ABC is beautifully laid out and presented and has clearly benefited from a very high standard of proofreading. The same can be said of CCD, but unfortunately not of CED.

ABC preserves the numerous good features of DeFrancis 1996 and adds many more. It is also, as the title suggests, much more comprehensive in its lexical scope. It contains 196,501 head entries (more if you count different parts of speech for the "same" word or distinct numbered definitions as distinct entries). By comparison, CED contains over 231,000 head entries (far more entries than that, in that some head entries have many phrases and compounds listed below them), and CCD contains over 60,000 head entries (more than that, in that some compounds are listed immediately after a monosyllabic head entry but not in the following compound list).

Like DeFrancis 1996, ABC is arranged in "strict single-sort alphabetical order," as distinct from CED and CCD, which are both 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. For example, to find the word yìshi, you first need to find yì, then to look (in ascending number of strokes) through some eighty characters pronounced yì before finding and thence . Alternatively, if you already know that yìshi is written , you can look up in the radical index and find it that way, without looking at all those other yì characters. 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—say, "shi^1-4 + xi^0-4"; ABC actually lists...