A Chinese–English Dictionary

A Chinese–English Dictionary (1892), compiled by the British consular officer and sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935), is the first Chinese–English encyclopedic dictionary. Giles started compilation after being rebuked for criticizing mistranslations in Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language. The 1,461-page first edition contains 13,848 Chinese character head entries alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade–Giles system, which Giles created as a modification of Thomas Wade's (1867) system. Giles' dictionary furthermore gives pronunciations from nine regional varieties of Chinese, and three Sino-Xenic languages Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Giles revised his dictionary into the 1,813-page second edition (1912) with the addition of 67 entries and numerous usage examples.

A Chinese–English Dictionary
Title page from Giles' A Chinese–English Dictionary (1892: i). The epigraph quotes Longinus, "Failure in a great attempt is at least a noble error".
AuthorHerbert Allen Giles
CountryChina
LanguageChinese, English
PublisherKelly and Walsh
Publication date
1892
Media typePrint
Pagesxlvi, 1415
OCLC272554592
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