Hardcover. Etat : Very Good. Ch'eng Wen Ltd..; Taipei, 1972. Hardcover. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, Second Reprinting. A Very Good, red cloth binding with gilt lettering on front board and spine, binding intact but a bit shaky due to size, stress crease to spine, bit of crimping to spine edges, bumped top spine, slightly bumped top board corners, some age toning to pages, bit of rubbing along board edges, text block. A nice and overall clean copy. Large 8vo[octavo or approx. 6 x 9 inches]. 1711pp.
"The nineteenth century ended on a high note in Chinese bilingual lexicography with the publication of Herbert A. Giles' A Chinese-English Dictionary. Giles (1845-1935) began his career in China in 1867 as an interpreter for the British Consular Service, returned to Ningbo as Consul in 1891 and in 1897 was named Professor of Chinese at Cambridge University. "Perhaps the most respected sinologist of his time, Giles wrote more than two dozen books on China. His crowning achievement was his Chinese-English Dictionary, first published in 1892 and revised in 1912. The dictionary is still useful today, especially to students of Imperial China and of Chinese literature, and formed the basis of Robert H. Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary (1931, 1943), perhaps the most popular Chinese-English dictionary in use until the 1970s" (Chien & Creamer, "A Brief History of Chinese Bilingual Lexicography," in vol. 40 of Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, Amsterdam, 1986).
The present enlarged edition contains the original 13,848 Chinese character head entries alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade"Giles system with the addition of 67 entries and numerous usage examples. A nice example of the most complete Chinese-English dictionary ever published. Herbert Giles worked for 18 years to compile and publish the 1892 first edition A Chinese-English Dictionary, which contains 10,859 character head entries plus 2,989 variant characters for a total of 13,848 entries. He decided to number every head entry"an improvement lacking in the earlier dictionaries of Morrison, Medhurst, and Williams"in order to facilitate internal cross-referencing and make it easier for users to find characters. Giles subsequently worked for 20 years revising and adding "a vast number of compounds and phrases" to the 1912 second edition, which contains 10,926 head entries (67 more) plus 2,922 variants, also totaling 13,848. (Cited from the discription of the Raptis Rare Books)