New Century English-Chinese Practical Dictionary

Author: Jie Jianhe, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: Since 1987, our research team has conducted multi-level and multi-dimensional research and compilation work on the establishment and application of English-Chinese bilingual corpora. We have now built an 8 million-word lexical database and developed a bidirectional English-Chinese retrieval system for typical words. Some of the research findings have been published in relevant journals, while simultaneously, several small and medium-sized reference books have been published based on this corpus. In recent years, our team has strengthened the collection, selection, and categorization of corpus materials. With the support and assistance of the Nantong Municipal Education Bureau, we organized a group of over 50 core English teachers from some universities in Nantong—Nantong Medical College, Nantong Institute of Technology, and Nantong Normal University—as well as some key high schools—to screen and compile the corpus materials. At the same time, a large amount of newly collected data was added, resulting in this comprehensive New Century English-Chinese Active Dictionary.
The purpose of compiling this dictionary is twofold: on one hand, it strives to adhere to traditional lexicographical principles, while on the other hand, it breaks certain conventions, incorporating new research findings in computer-assisted lexicography, applied linguistics, English vocabulary studies, English grammar, pragmatics, and semantics. The selection of words in this dictionary is based on the corpus data (referencing the COBUILD 1995 edition and the LONGMAN 1995 edition), with item definitions arranged in the order of their frequency in the corpus survey. It aims to provide English language teachers and learners with authentic language value tables. In addition to basic and common words, this dictionary also includes advanced vocabulary. It contains 39,325 headwords, 5,902 derived words, 136,110 definitions, 22,822 phrases, and 140,709 usage examples.
The compilation team pays equal attention to the core components of language—basic vocabulary, basic word meanings, and basic grammar—as well as the "new" and "creative" aspects—by incorporating new words, new word combinations, new definitions, and new usage examples, reflecting a fresh perspective and creating intuitive, clear, and explicit new markup codes. Notably, it incorporates the teaching experience, learning insights, and research findings of numerous English teachers over decades, striving to provide readers with a basis for learning authentic and correct English.