The Zhengzitong ( Chinese: 正字通; pinyin: Zhèngzìtōng; Wade–Giles: Cheng-tzu-t'ung; lit. 'Correct Character Mastery') was a 17th-century Chinese dictionary. The Ming dynasty 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, and called it the Zihui bian (字彙辯; "Zihui Disputations"). The Qing dynasty 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 spellings, definitions, explanations, and citations from Chinese classic texts. Zhang Zilie was a native of Jiangxi Province, and his Zhengzitong contains many linguistically valuable dialectal terms from Southeastern China. The famous 1716 Kangxi Zidian relied heavily upon the Zhengzitong. [1]
References
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^ 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
ISBN
7-101-00840-2 (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. ISBN 4-273-02890-5 (in Japanese).
