Chinese Rationale Dictionary

Author: Wang Ailu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: This book includes 3,700 modern Chinese lexical items. It only includes content words, excluding function words. The majority of the included words are Chinese compound words. The focus and purpose of the definitions in this book are to reveal the etymology of the words. However, understanding the etymology requires first grasping the rational meaning of the words, so it is necessary to provide a brief explanation of the rational meaning of the words. In the definitions, both the explanations of morpheme meanings and the explanations of "meaning anchors" are presented using colons: the left side of the colon is the morpheme or meaning anchor, and the right side is its definition. This book provides multiple etymologies for many lexical items, which are explanations that the author considers reasonably or very reasonable. The author is reluctant to omit these valuable materials and has included them here for readers to refer to when making their final choices. The entries in this book are arranged in the order of the Pinyin pronunciation of the first character. If the first character is the same, they are arranged by the second character, and if the second character is also the same, they are arranged by the third character. An index of Pinyin pronunciations for the entries is provided at the beginning of the main text for readers to search. At the end of the main text, there are three introductory essays to help readers understand the theoretical background of the etymological dictionary.