The content-rich 11th edition
"The latest edition has unprecedentedly increased its content by about one third, highlighting social changes over the past decades," added Zhou.
There are about 13,000 logograms in this new version, which includes more than 800 logograms from family names, place names, technical terminology, and new words that have emerged during the past few years.
One example is "xueli men," or "diplomagate." It refers to a scandal using counterfeit academic degrees to gain job opportunities or an official position. The word originated from the "Watergate scandal" in the United States in the 1970s.
Various words can be put ahead of the character "men" to indicate a scandal.
New explanations and examples have been added to the book in order to clarify the new use of some words and synonyms. The character "shai," which originally meant to dry or bask, now has a new meaning – "to display" – in the new version.
Terms like "shai yinsi" meaning to display one's private things/life in front of others, especially over the Internet, and "shai xingfu," which means to display happiness, are used frequently by young people.
Some widely used Internet terms have been added to the book in a bid to reflect new phenomena in society. "Nu" or "slave" presents a new meaning in words such as "fang nu," or "house slave," which refers to people striving to earn money so as to buy an apartment at a time when housing prices are surging. The word "nu" can also be used in expressions such as "car slave" and "credit-card slave."
"Some may say that the 'Xinhua Zidian' is losing its authority by printing on-line popular words, but actually not all popular words were written in this book," said Yu Dianli, general manager of the Commercial Press.
"In order to maintain and safeguard the authority of the dictionary, the experienced compilers of this dictionary chose to use certain nascent Internet words after discussing the words' social influence and analyzing the frequency of use for quite a long time," explained Yu.
In addition, the book also added 1,500 traditional characters, which are officially used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, in a bid to encourage communication between the Chinese mainland and these three places.
The book also removed characters referring to "kerosene," "horsepower," and other outdated words and excised definitions like "people can eat pigs" when explaining the character "zhu" or "pig" to guide pupils to better understand the importance of protecting animals.
New challenges
Even though it is the best-selling language-tool in the world, some doubt the necessity of using a dictionary in this fast-changing era that is dominated by the Internet, for one can check a character online in just seconds.
"Dictionaries are definitely important for beginners of the Chinese written language and Chinese pupils," said a teacher in Nanjing.
The Internet is a fast way to check characters, but if you need detailed information only a dictionary can help, said one bookseller who also admitted that the selling of dictionaries in recent years has decreased a little.
"'Xinhua Zidian' is just a pocket-sized book, but it includes all the information a student needs and it is easy to carry," said Wang Qin, a mother who just bought a dictionary for her child.
The Internet brings us convenience, but the role of dictionary cannot be replaced.
