Xiandai Hanyu Cidian
Authoritative one-volume Chinese-language dictionary
- 3 min read
- 4 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Dictionary and China
In 1994, A Dictionary of Current Chinese won China's First National Book Award. The seventh edition contains about 70,000 entries including characters, words and expressions, idiomatic phrases and idioms. The dictionary is also available in digital format on CD-ROMs and Traditional Chinese digital versions.
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian was consulted in the writing of The First Series of Standardized Forms of Words with Non-standardized Variant Forms.
Editions
Sign in to keep reading
3 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
New entries in the 6th edition
Traditional Chinese edition
A traditional Chinese edition was published in 2001 by the Commercial Press (Hong Kong). It contains about 60,000 entries, with all entries labeled with Zhuyin alongside Hanyu Pinyin.
- 現代漢語詞典（繁體版） [A Dictionary of Current Chinese (Traditional Chinese edition)]. 2001. ISBN 9789620702112.
- 現代漢語詞典－繁體版光盤 [A Dictionary of Current Chinese - Traditional Chinese CD-ROM Version]. ISBN 9789620702143.
Controversies
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian had given discriminatory explanations to certain words and phrases. An example was the word "homosexuality" (simplified Chinese: 同性恋; traditional Chinese: 同性戀; pinyin: tóngxìngliàn). From the first edition in the 1970s (the entry in that edition is 同性恋爱 tóngxìng liàn'ài - literally 'same-sex love') to the fifth edition in 2005 of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, the definition of the term had been "determined" as "a type of psychological perversion". In the 2012 6th edition & 2016 7th edition, the term was redefined as "sexual behaviour between persons of the same sex".
In the sixth edition, even though it contains a large number of new vocabulary, the word 同志 Tóngzhì ("comrade") which is an informal term for "a homosexual person", was not included in the dictionary. This could be because the term is often construed as a sarcastic reference to the Chinese Communist Party, according to Sociology Professor Ding Xueliang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The original term is a common form of political address in China, e.g. Comrade Hu Jintao, Comrade Wen Jiabao.
Some detractors complained that "Entries starting with the Western alphabet" section in the 6th edition allegedly violated the regulation - "Chinese language publications shall comply with the norms and standards of the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese language" in laws such as the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language and Publication Control Regulations of the State Council (State Council Act No. 594). The act of using English vocabulary in the main body of a Chinese dictionary, and using English to substitute for Chinese characters, according to these detractors, will cause the greatest damage to the Chinese characters since the romanization of Chinese, and will have a long-term negative impact on the language.
The publisher, the Commercial Press, replied that the section is meant just for easy references when looking up the dictionary. The Commercial Press says that according to a rule stated in a 2010 document by the State Council Office Secretariat, alphabetical entries recorded in Chinese dictionaries written by state authorities did not have corresponding Chinese translations. Hence, it is absolutely fine to include them in dictionaries.