Chapter 12 Section 3 Number of Chinese Characters and Dictionaries

Due to the breeding of Chinese characters, its number must grow from small to large and continue to develop.The situation of this development can be understood through the archives of Chinese characters—the dictionary. The earliest fonts that record the Chinese characters we have discovered so far-the dictionary of oracle bone inscriptions, the representative one is "Oracle Bone Inscriptions".This book was compiled by Sun Haibo and is divided into three parts: the first is the "main edition", which contains 1,723 characters that are generally recognizable at present; , including 2,949 characters that are currently unrecognized or have not yet been identified.Therefore, the total number of characters in oracle bone inscriptions is 4672.

A dictionary that collects bronze inscriptions, including the shape and number of inscriptions in Yin, Shang, Western Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States periods, is called "Jin Wen Bian".Its editor is Rong Geng.This book is divided into two parts, the "main edition" and the "appendix". The "main edition" contains 2,420 words, and the "appendix" contains 1,352 words. The sum of the two is 3,772. Now it seems that the bronze inscriptions of the Yin and Zhou Dynasties only have more than 3,000 characters, while the earlier oracle bone inscriptions have more than 4,000 characters. It seems that it does not conform to the law of the development of Chinese characters from less to more.Why is this?The main reason is that the pictorial nature of oracle bone inscriptions is stronger than that of bronze inscriptions in general, and many of them are relatively primitive graphic characters. There are especially many special characters such as names of people and places, many of which have long since died out and cannot be recognized today.Bronze inscriptions, on the other hand, combined many graphic characters of oracle bone inscriptions, and there were fewer special characters such as names of people and places, so the total number of characters was reduced, but the recognizable characters were more than oracle bone inscriptions.

Since then, the number of Chinese characters has shown a rising trend. In terms of the age when it came out, "Shuowen Jiezi" is the first dictionary in my country to record Chinese characters.We have mentioned this work compiled by Eastern Han scholar Xu Shen more than once above. "Shuowen Jiezi" mainly collects the small seal characters of Chinese characters, with a total of 9353 characters.Xu Shen pioneered the arrangement of Chinese characters according to their shapes and meanings, which are divided into 540 parts; the first character of each part is called "radical".Chinese dictionaries still have the "radical arrangement method" today, which should be attributed to Xu Shen's invention.It's just that the radicals used in general dictionaries today have been merged on the basis of "Shuowen Jiezi", and there are only more than 200.

In the Western Jin Dynasty, Lu Chen compiled a "Zi Lin", which was also divided into 540 parts according to "Shuowen Jiezi", with a total of 12,824 characters. King Gu Ye between Liang and Chen in the Southern Dynasties compiled a dictionary "Jade Pian", which is divided into 542 parts and contains 16,917 characters. Lu Fayan compiled "Qie Yun" in the Sui Dynasty.This is a "rhyme book", which is to arrange Chinese characters according to their pronunciation, and it is mainly for people to check when composing poems and rhymes.Rhyme books also have descriptions of the shape and meaning of Chinese characters, so they are also a kind of dictionary. "Qie Yun" has been lost to later generations, but it still existed in the early Northern Song Dynasty.A group of scholars at that time, headed by Chen Pengnian, edited "Guangyun" on the basis of "Qieyun", with more than 26,000 characters.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, a scholar named Mei Yingzuo [yingzuo Yingzuo] compiled a "Zihui" with 33,179 characters, simplified the radicals of "Shuowen Jiezi", and combined them into 214 volumes. In the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Kangxi ordered the compilation of a "Kangxi Dictionary", which was collectively cooperated by scholars such as Zhang Yushu.There are also 214 radicals in the whole book, and 47035 characters. Some people have made statistics, before the "Kangxi Dictionary" was compiled, the number of Chinese characters increased from five to six thousand to ten thousand every five or six hundred years.In other words, about a dozen new words are added every year.

After the "Kangxi Dictionary", the addition of Chinese characters is not much, and the new additions are mainly some newly created characters of science and technology and characters used in some local dialects. In 1915, the "Chinese Dictionary" was published, with 48,000 characters. In 1968, "Chinese Dictionary" was published in Taiwan, with 49,905 characters. In recent years, Sichuan Dictionary Publishing House has published the "Chinese Dictionary", a total of eight volumes with more than 54,000 characters. However, there are only a few thousand Chinese characters actually used in the past dynasties. A large number of Chinese characters are just passers-by in history, or are only used by a small number of people in a small range, but they are all recorded in dictionaries and become "" dead words", "dictionary words".In addition, some characters with different shapes are actually just different ways of writing the same character, which are called "variant characters" (see below), such as "sheng, sheng, sheng", "zha, zha, ji", etc. Many dictionaries also use them as Different prefixes are included.In this way, it is no wonder that more and more Chinese characters have been collected in the dictionaries of the past dynasties.