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Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 41:2/3 (2014) ► pp.299–322

The Making of the First Chinese-English Dictionary

Robert Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts (1815–1823)

| Beijing Foreign Studies University

The first printed Chinese–English dictionary was the Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts compiled by Robert Morrison (1782–1834) published between 1815 and 1823. Two hundred years later it is still in use. This paper traces the tradition of missionary bilingual lexicography in China from its origins down to Morrison. While early manuscript bilingual dictionaries solved the problems of transliteration, alphabetical arrangement of Chinese entries, definition and grammatical information, Morrison improved the transliteration system which he had inherited, invented a new index system matching alphabetically arranged transliterations with Chinese characters, and provided a large number of citations from Chinese classics and popular contemporary Chinese books. Morrison’s lexicographical legacy is reflected in the fact that his transliteration was adopted as the basis for the Wade-Giles system and that the macrostructure and microstructure of his dictionary became a model for Samuel Wells Williams’ (1812–1884) Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language 漢英韻府 (1874, re-edited until 1909) and Henry Allen Giles’ (1845–1935) Chinese-English Dictionary (1892, last ed., 1972.)

Published online: 10 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.41.2-3.04yan
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