ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary

ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary

July 2003 (slightly revised through July 2005): the new Comprehensive book is out! Its ISBN number is 0-8248-2766-X and you can find it at the ABC Chinese Dictionary Series website, and at various bookstores. We enthusiastically recommend the book! Unlike the software, it requires no electricity. And, unlike any other printed Chinese dictionary, it makes it easy to look up any word if you know its pronunciation, even if you are unsure of the tones and may not know how it is written in Chinese characters.

In April, 1997, Wenlin Institute, Inc. signed a license agreement with the University of Hawaii, to combine Wenlin with the ABC (Alphabetically Based Computerized) Chinese-English Dictionary, edited by John DeFrancis. One and a half years later, publication of the integrated product Wenlin 2.0 was finally announced. By far the greatest improvement ever to happen to Wenlin is combining it with this top-rate dictionary containing over 72,000 entries; but that was not the end of the story. John DeFrancis and his team (now including Tom Bishop of Wenlin Institute) continued working on the dictionary, increasing the number of entries to over 196,000 and making many more improvements. The new Comprehensive ABC Dictionary was included in electronic form with Wenlin 3.0, released in July 2002, and the book was published by the University of Hawaii Press in July 2003. (Some corrections were made to the dictionary, after the release of Wenlin 3.0, before the publication of the Comprehensive book. These corrections will have to be incorporated in a future version of Wenlin.).

All of Wenlin's vocabulary-related features -- Instant Lookup, vocabulary lists, pinyin conversion, etc. -- have been extensively revised for complete integration with ABC. Wenlin really has three dictionaries:

Cidian -- dictionary of Chinese words and phrases (词典 cídiǎn)
Zidian -- dictionary of single Chinese characters (字典 zìdiǎn)
Ying-Han -- English-Chinese dictionary (英汉词典 Yīng-Hàn cídiǎn)

The biggest transformation is in the cidian -- the number of entries went from about 14,000 in Wenlin 1.0, to over 74,000 in Wenlin 2.0, to over 196,000 in Wenlin 3.0! Nearly all the entries in the old cidian had corresponding entries in ABC that were more extensive. Where ABC and the old cidian both had entries for the same word, the ABC entry is always used as the main entry in the new cidian, and the old entry is appended below it, separated by a horizontal line. Most of the old entries are superfluous, but a few may have some value.

Wenlin's zidian is separate in origin from ABC, but has also undergone numerous improvements since Wenlin 1.0, including corrections to pronunciations for consistency with the ABC cidian, as well as the addition of many new entries for characters that were too rare even to be included in ABC.

Wenlin's Ying-Han (English-Chinese) dictionary, which was ridiculously small (less than 5,000 entries) in version 1.0, was made less ridiculous (or at least less small) in Wenlin 2.0 by turning the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary "inside-out", giving a total of over 18,000 entries. For example, the old dictionary didn't have the word zipper. But ABC has two Chinese entries with the definition zipper, so those two words became the definition of zipper in the new dictionary. The old dictionary had only 13 entries starting with Z: z, zeal, zealous, zebra, zenith, zero, zest, zigzag, zinc, zone, zoo, zoologial, and zoology. The new dictionary has 20 more: Zaire, zamba, Zambia, zebu, Zen, zestful, zestfully, Zhengzhou, Zibo, Zimbabwe, zinc-plate, zipper, zokor, zonal, Zoroastrianism, Zulu, Zunyi, zygote, zymase, and zymogen! This process has not been repeated, however, using the Comprehensive ABC; Wenlin 3.0 still has nearly the same English-Chinese dictionary as Wenlin 2.0.

Fortunately, John DeFrancis and his ABC team are already working on a bona-fide English-Chinese dictionary. Possibly an electronic version of it will be published with Wenlin 4.0.

Sublicensing

In addition to using ABC with our own software, Wenlin Institute is authorized by the University of Hawaii to grant sublicenses to other software developers and researchers. We welcome inquiries about sublicensing, and have already negotiated several sublicenses. Please see the UH OTTED web page concerning ABC, and also our own page about developer and researcher licenses.

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