Looking Up a Sinograph in the Kangxi Dictionary

Looking up a Chinese word in an English-Chinese dictionary is as straightforward as you would expect, and looking up a Chinese character if you know the Pinyin is relatively easy, as well. But looking up the Chinese or English definition for a Chinese character can be a challenge for the new student of the Chinese language.

Whereas it is possible for even the young schoolchild to memorize the sequence of the 26 English letters, the sheer quantity of Chinese characters (47,000+ in the Kangxi dictionary^[1]) makes it impossible to do the same in Chinese. In this post I'll describe the system the Chinese use for looking up characters in their dictionary. For the beginner, this act is a sort of philosophical experience. It takes much patience and it's slow going and even frustrating. Before one can begin, it's essential to become familiar with two concepts:

1. Strokes. Each radical and character is composed of a number of strokes.
2. The Chinese radicals, not pro-democracy revolutionaries but rather, the 214 components that form the basis for the Chinese character set.

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Strokes

Each character in the Chinese alphabet comprises up to 30 strokes, a stroke being defined as one the portions of a character that can be drawn with a writing device without removing the nib from the page. Chinese schoolchildren spend long hours practicing each of these named strokes as they learn the characters.

The character yī (一, which means one) serves as a simple example, consisting of one horizontal stroke.

The 8 basic forms of strokes: CSUN (Cal State University)

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Radicals

Radicals are simple characters or portions of characters that were popularized during the Qing dynasty, when the emperor Kangxi commissioned the dictionary. Knowledge of the radicals aids character look-up dramatically.

This list from YellowBridge displays English names for the radicals.

Once you have attained proficiency with the 214 radicals, you will be in a position to examine a character you wish to look up and identify the radical. Having done so, and by now being able to discern a radical's stroke count, you would look the radical up, perhaps in an online dictionary such as this page from mdbg: Radical/Strokes Lookup^[2].

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Having located the radical in an online lookup page such as mdbg's, you would click it to reveal another page displaying all the character candidates based on that radical.

For example, having located the 2-stroke radical yán(讠), you would click it and thereby find yourself at this page, which renders all the characters based on this radical:

Next, extrapolate an index into this chart by subtracting the stroke count of the radical from the stroke count of the entire character in order to find the row containing the character you're looking for. Click that character and you'll be rewarded for your efforts with a page containing the definition of the character.

You would use a hard-copy dictionary the same way, but online tools are much more convenient.

Pretty easy, right? Now that you're familiar with the Simplified Chinese character set, we'll move on to the more complex Traditional set in a future post. I'm just kidding. It's frustrating as hell, really.

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1. A relatively literate person need "only" be proficient at 3,000-4,000 characters.
2. Most dictionaries also allow the user who might not be able to identify a character's radical to look up the character based on total stroke count, but there are typically and extraordinarily large number of characters with the same stroke count, so this is typically done only as a last resort.