The ''Zhengzitong'' () was a 17th-century

Chinese dictionary There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have d ...

. The

Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty, officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming was the last imperial dynasty of ...

scholar Zhang Zilie (張自烈; Chang Tzu-lieh) originally published it in 1627 as a supplement to the 1615 '' Zihui'' dictionary of

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

, and called it the ''Zihui bian'' (字彙辯; "''Zihui'' Disputations"). The

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

author Liao Wenying (廖文英; Liao Wen-ying) bought Zhang's manuscript, renamed it ''Zhengzitong'', and published it under his own name in 1671. The received edition ''Zhengzitong'' has over 33,000 headwords in 12 fascicles ( 卷). Following the format of the ''Zihui'', the character headwords give alternate graphs, ''

fanqie ''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè, l=reverse cut) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired ...

'' spellings, definitions, explanations, and citations from

Chinese classic texts The Chinese classics or canonical texts are the works of Chinese literature authored prior to the establishment of the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Prominent examples include the Four Books and Five Classics in the Neo-Confucian tradi ...

. Zhang Zilie was a native of

Jiangxi Province ; Gan: ) , translit_lang1_type2 = , translit_lang1_info2 = , translit_lang1_type3 = , translit_lang1_info3 = , image_map = Jiangxi in China (+all claims hatched).svg , mapsize = 275px , map_caption = Location ...

, and his ''Zhengzitong'' contains many linguistically valuable dialectal terms from Southeastern China. The famous 1716 '' Kangxi Zidian'' relied heavily upon the ''Zhengzitong''.Liu Yeqiu 刘叶秋. 1992. ''Zhongguo zidian shilue'' 中国字典史略 ("Historical Outline of Chinese Dictionaries"). Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju. pp. 135-9 (in Chinese).
Nagatomi Aochi 永富青地. 1996. "正字通". In ''Nihon jisho jiten'' 日本辞書辞典 ("Encyclopedia of Dictionaries Published in Japan"), ed. Okimori Takuya 沖森卓也, et al., p. 163. Tokyo: Ōfū. (in Japanese).

References

External links

正字通 scanned text
–

Chinese Text Project The Chinese Text Project (CTP; ) is a digital library project that assembles collections of early Chinese texts. The name of the project in Chinese literally means "The Chinese Philosophical Book Digitization Project", showing its focus on books ...

Ming dynasty Chinese classic texts Chinese dictionaries {{dictionary-stub