The most influential Chinese dictionary -- the Xinhua Dictionary -- has become the world's best-selling dictionary with a circulation of 400 million. On average, one in three Chinese own a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary.
Published in 1957 by the Commercial Press as the first standardized Chinese dictionary in the People's Republic of China, the Xinhua Dictionary has been revised eight times.
Yu Dianli, distribution director of the Commercial Press, said that the 600,000-Chinese character dictionary is the result of hard work by generations of scholars. "It has set an example for other Chinese dictionaries with its original layout, fonts, phonetic notation and explanations," Yu said. The Chinese-English edition of the dictionary has been published this year, Yu added.
The Xinhua Dictionary is also a reference book for tens of thousands of Chinese language learners in such countries as Japan, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia.
(People’s Daily 09/28/2000)
