Chinese character

Chinese characters or Han characters (??/??) are logograms used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the Japanese and Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea). Use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese language ? in which they were used until the 20th century ? and from North Korea, where in normal writing they have been completely replaced by Hangul.

Dictionaries

The design and use of a dictionary of Chinese characters presents interesting problems. Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for the Chinese characters. The great majority of these schemes — beloved by their inventors but nobody else — have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use. This is the system of radicals.

Related Topics:
Dictionary - Radicals

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Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several different ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer strokes come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. In Japanese and Korean dictionaries, it is usually possible to search for characters by sound, using Kana and Hangul. Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well.

Related Topics:
Stroke - Kana - Hangul

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For instance, to look up the character 松 (pine tree) in a typical dictionary, the user first determines which part of the character is the radical, then counts the number of strokes in the radical (in this case four), and turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of the dictionary). Under the number 4, the user locates the radical 木, then turns to the page number listed, which is the start of the listing of all the characters containing this radical. This page will have a sub-index giving stroke numbers and page numbers. The right half of the character also contains four strokes, so the user locates the number 4, and turns to the page number given. From there, the user must scan the entries to locate the character he or she is seeking. Some dictionaries have a sub-index which lists every character containing each radical, so that if the user knows the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the correct page number directly.

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In Korean, character dictionaries are usually called Okpyeon (옥편; 玉篇), which literally means "Jewel Book", rather like the Latin word thesaurus ("treasure"). 玉篇 is also the name of a fourth-century Chinese dictionary from the Liang Dynasty.

Related Topics:
Latin - Liang Dynasty

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Another popular dictionary system is the four corner method.

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Most Chinese-English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English speakers use the radical lookup method combined with an alphabetical listing of characters based on their pinyin romanization system. To use one of these dictionaries, the reader finds the radical and stroke number of the character, as before, and locates the character in the radical index. The character's entry will have the character's pronunciation in pinyin written down; the reader then turns to the main dictionary section and looks up the pinyin spelling alphabetically, just as if it were an English dictionary.

Related Topics:
Pinyin - Romanization

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