A Dictionary of Idioms

Author: Wen Duanzheng Wen Niyan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: A language tool book tailor-made for students' college entrance and high school entrance exams, once best-selling across the country with a sales volume of 1,200,000 copies. In terms of content, the old version has been optimized according to the new teaching requirements, emphasizing innovation, origin, cultivation, and practicality. In terms of form, the new layout with double-color printing is adopted to solemnity, elegance, vitality, and novelty.
A proverb is a type of set phrase, consisting of two parts, often using puns based on homophones or semantic double meanings to convey meaning. This book collects common proverbs, meeting general reading needs.
I. Headings. This book includes over 2,000 entries, divided into main entries and "also as" entries. The main entries are the basic forms of proverbs, with explanations and example sentences provided; the "also as" entries are alternative forms of the main entries, with the same or nearly the same meaning as the main entries, and no further explanation is needed. All entries use original characters, with homophones noted in the explanations; example sentences retain their original form without changes. A comma is used uniformly between the two parts of the entry, and commas or dashes are used in example sentences as originally written without changes.
II. Typography. The fonts used in this book are based on the "General Table of Simplified Characters" compiled by the National Language and Character Work Committee and the "List for the Rectification of Variant Characters" jointly issued by the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China and the Committee for the Reform of Chinese Characters.
III. Pronunciation. Obscure characters in entries are annotated with Pinyin; easily misread characters have their correct pronunciations and common mispronunciations noted.
IV. Definitions. This book focuses on revealing the puns (homophonic or semantic) used in proverbs to explain their original and contextual meanings.
V. Example Sentences. Each proverb is accompanied by an example sentence to illustrate its meaning and usage. The source of the example sentence is generally noted, with "newspaper" or "journal" used for brevity when citing from publications.
VI. Arrangement. Entries are arranged in the order of Pinyin. Entries with different first characters are ordered by the sound of the first character. Entries with the same first character are ordered by stroke count, with fewer strokes listed first. Entries with the same first and second characters are ordered by the sound of the third character, and so on.
VII. Index. An index of the stroke count of the first character of the entries is provided at the end of the book for reference.