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Explanatory Notes

This dictionary is primarily designed for anyone desiring to learn Chinese, and it may equally be very useful to those fluent in Chinese who wish to improve their English. Many efforts have been made to meet both of these needs since this dictionary contains many thousands of sentences using idiomatic and up-to-date in Chinese and English. Extreme care was taken to render all translations as accurately as possible.

Headwords, phrases and idioms

The dictionary includes approximately 25,000 headwords, all of which are printed in color.

Homographs, which are different words of the same spelling, are listed as separate headwords and are indicated by number, e.g.

seal¹ N 海豹 hǎibào [M. WD 头 tóu]

seal² V 封闭 fēngbì

…

seal³ N 印章 yìnzhāng, 图章 túzhāng [M. WD 枚 méi]

Irregular plural forms of nouns and irregular past tense and past participles of verbs are given in brackets immediately following the headwords, e.g.

man (PL men)

do (PT did; PP done)

When a Chinese noun requires a special measure word, it is shown in square brackets, e.g.

earphones N 耳机 ěrjī [M. WD 副 fù]

Where no measure word is supplied, it indicates that the noun may be used with the default measure word 个 gè.

This dictionary also includes around 8,000 phrases and idioms which are printed in color. This increases the lexical items to about 40,000, which is highly adequate for general professional discourse as well as everyday communication.

Phonetic notation of the Chinese language

In order to help the user properly pronounce the Chinese in this dictionary, every Chinese word, phrase and sentence is transliterated using pinyin which is the standard phonetic notation used nowadays. The Pronunciation section in Introducing Chinese demonstrates how to pronounce Chinese words with the help of this notation scheme. There are many free online resources which may be of use to those who wish to practice their pronunciation.

Definitions

Definitions for all headwords are given in their Chinese equivalents or near-equivalents. These Chinese words were chosen from the word lists taken from the world-recognized HSK Chinese Language Proficiency Examination. For a more complete reference regarding these word lists, you may wish to consult Tuttle Chinese-English Dictionary (2009).

When a word is used in more than one grammatical category, the different parts of speech are indicated by I, II, etc, and different meanings are listed by 1, 2, etc. For example:

document I N 1 文件 wénjiàn 2 （计算机）文件／文档 (jìsuànjī) wénjiàn/wéndàng II V 1 记录 jìlù 2 [事实+] 证明 [shìshí+] zhèngmíng

When a word has a distinct meaning in a particular phrase, that phrase is shown in brackets within the particular part of speech, e.g.

wolf

…

V (to wolf down) 狼狼吞虎咽 lángtūn hǔyān, 狼狼吞虎咽地吃 lángtūn hǔyān de chī

In many cases common collocations are supplied in square brackets, e.g.

lofty ADJ 1 崇高的 [+理想] chónggāo de [+lǐxiǎng] 2 高傲的 [+人] gāo’ào de [+rén], 傲慢的 àomàn de

This means that when lofty has the sense of 崇高的 (“idealistic”) it is commonly collocated with 理想 (“thinking”), and that when it means 高傲的 (“snobbish”), it is usually followed by 人 (“people”).

Brackets are used to indicate that an element is optional, e.g.

crew N 1（飞机）机组人员 (fēijī) jīzǔ rényuán, …

This indicates that crew may be 机组人员 jīzǔ rényuán or 飞机机组人员 fēijī jīzǔ rényuán (“aircrew”).

Example sentences

An important feature of this dictionary is the large number of example sentences with Chinese translations, about 10,000 in all. In many respects, this dictionary can be regarded as an “example sentence dictionary”. These sentences not only illustrate the meanings and usages of the more common words in English and Chinese, but also provide “ready-made” materials for instant communication and essay writing, for example. Each sentence is carefully composed to reflect the real life of the English-speaking world in order to assist the user in everyday matters, school or at work. Sentences from a wide variety of subject matters are included, and there is a good emphasis on the business and education realms as well as home life.

Grammar codes

ABBREV	abbreviation
ADJ	adjective
ADV	adverb
CONJ	conjunction
INTERJ	interjection
M. WD	measure word
N	noun
NUM	numeral
PL	plural form
PP	past participle
PREP	preposition
PRON	pronoun
PT	past tense
V	verb