Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What was the original publisher of the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary?
The ABC Chinese–English Dictionary or ABC Dictionary (1996), compiled under the chief editorship of John DeFrancis, is the first Chinese dictionary to collate entries in single-sort alphabetical order of pinyin romanization, and a landmark in the history of Chinese lexicography. It was also the first publication in the University of Hawai'i Press's "ABC" (Alphabetically Based Computerized) series of Chinese dictionaries. They republished the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" in a pocket edition (1999) and desktop reference edition (2000), as well as the expanded "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (2003) and dual "ABC Chinese–English/English-Chinese Dictionary" (2010). Furthermore, the "ABC Dictionary" databases have been developed into computer applications such as Wenlin Software for learning Chinese (1997).
In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".
The first dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full title was "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society"; the 352-page volume, words from "A" to "Ant", cost 12s 6d. (or about $668.24 in 2013) The total sales were only 4,000 copies.
ABC-CLIO was founded in 1953 as a privately held corporation by Eric Boehm with its first publication, "Historical Abstracts". The name represents the company's two original divisions when it incorporated in 1969: ABC stands for American Bibliographical Center and CLIO Press is named after Clio, the muse of history from ancient Greek mythology. According to Boehm, he had always been interested in history so when he noticed that there were not many good historical abstracting services available, he started publishing the "Historical Abstracts".
During the 1960s, a sister bibliographic and abstract publication on American history was added, "America: History and Life", which was considered an award-winning title. The company entered into digital publishing with electronic data in the 1960s and in 1975, it published its first online database called "DIALOG". During the 1980s, ABC-CLIO expanded into providing primary reference books such as encyclopedias and dictionaries and stopped publishing bibliographic books. In the 1990s, ABC-CLIO began to provide access to its humanities database on CD-ROM. The "Exegy Current Events" CD-ROM was named "Best Disc of the Year" by Library Journal. In 1998, ABC-CLIO provided electronic access to "America: History and Life". By the 2000s, one of the company's most popular products had become online databases for researching many topics in the field of the humanities. In 2001, ABC-CLIO began to publish eBooks, initially providing 150 different titles to schools and libraries. The company's reference books had won numerous awards, and the company started a series of subject-related online databases for secondary school use. In 2004, the company acquired the quarterly historical journal, "Journal of the West", which has been published since 1962.
In 1996, ABC-CLIO merged with an electronic publishing company, Intellimation, which also produced educational software. The merger brought Becky Snyder, ABC-CLIO's current president, from Intellimation. It sold "Historical Abstracts" and "America: History and Life" to EBSCO Publishing in 2007.
The Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) is a single-volume English dictionary published by Oxford University Press, first published in 1998 as The New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE). The word "new" was dropped from the title with the Second Edition in 2003. This dictionary is not based on the "Oxford English Dictionary" and should not be mistaken for a new or updated version of the OED. It is a completely new dictionary which strives to represent as faithfully as possible the current usage of English words.
As the last two of these features indicate, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. This form remained prestigious long after the capital moved to Beijing in 1421, though the speech of the new capital emerged as a rival standard. As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on this koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.
Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit the second supplement; Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement "(OEDS)" had grown to four volumes, starting with "A", "H", "O", and "Sea". They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing the complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement.
The "Britannica" is the English-language encyclopaedia/encyclopedia that was in print for the longest time: it lasted 244 years. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, as three volumes. (This first edition is available in facsimile.) The encyclopaedia grew in size: the second edition was 10 volumes, and by its fourth edition (1801–1810) it had expanded to 20 volumes. Its rising stature as a scholarly work helped recruit eminent contributors, and the 9th (1875–1889) and 11th editions (1911) are landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style. Beginning with the 11th edition and following its acquisition by an American firm, the "Britannica" shortened and simplified articles to broaden its appeal to the North American market. In 1933, the "Britannica" became the first encyclopaedia to adopt "continuous revision", in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted, with every article updated on a schedule. In March 2012, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced it would no longer publish printed editions, and would focus instead on "Encyclopædia Britannica Online".
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (often abbreviated to ODB) is a three-volume historical dictionary published by the English Oxford University Press. With more than 5,000 entries, it contains comprehensive information in English on topics relating to the Byzantine Empire. It was edited by Alexander Kazhdan, and was first published in 1991. Kazhdan was a professor at Princeton University who became a Senior Research Associate at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC before his death. He contributed to many of the articles in the Dictionary and always signed his initials "A.K." at the end of the article to indicate his contribution.
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize. The People's Republic of China claims that both goals have been achieved, but some external observers disagree. Little systematic study has been conducted on how simplified Chinese has affected the way Chinese people become literate; the only studies conducted before it was standardized in mainland China seem to have been statistical ones regarding how many strokes were saved on average in samples of running text.
Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC, but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy. As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to the standard spoken language ("Mandarin"). Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.
The "Britannica" was the idea of Colin Macfarquhar, a bookseller and printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver, both of Edinburgh. They conceived of the "Britannica" as a conservative reaction to the French "Encyclopédie" of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. Ironically, the "Encyclopédie" had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, "Cyclopaedia" published by Ephraim Chambers in 1728. Although later editions of Chambers' "Cyclopaedia" were still popular, and despite the commercial failure of other English encyclopedias, Macfarquhar and Bell were inspired by the intellectual ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment and thought the time ripe for a new encyclopedia "compiled upon a new plan".
Journey to the West is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In English-speaking countries, "Monkey", Arthur Waley's popular abridged translation is well known.
In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of 
the "Encyclopædia Britannica", 11th edition (1911), but disagreement about the method halted the work after the first volume. For trademark reasons this has been published as the "Gutenberg Encyclopedia". Project Gutenberg has restarted work on digitising and proofreading this encyclopedia. Project Gutenberg has published volumes in alphabetic order the most recent publication is "Volume 17 Slice 8: Matter–Mecklenburg" published on 7 April 2013. The latest "Britannica" was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as a CD-ROM, and later as an online service.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Soviet Chinese people, like most sizable ethnic groups in the early USSR, had a writing system based on the Latin alphabet developed for them; it was used to publish a number of periodicals. A separate, different, Latin-based writing system was simultaneously developed for the Dungans, who were already considered a separate ethnic group. This was accompanied by a broader campaign to raise literacy among Chinese workers, estimated at just one-third in 1923. By the 1930s, there were ten state elementary schools, one vocational secondary school, one college, and two evening schools using Chinese as their medium of instruction.
In 1991, for the 20-volume "OED2" (1989), the compact edition format was re-sized to one-third of original linear dimensions, a nine-up ("9-up") format requiring greater magnification, but allowing publication of a single-volume dictionary. It was accompanied by a magnifying glass as before and "A User's Guide to the "Oxford English Dictionary"", by Donna Lee Berg. After these volumes were published, though, book club offers commonly continued to sell the two-volume 1971 "Compact Edition".
In 1604 he was recruited for one of the Cambridge committees set up to translate the Bible into English. He also served in the "Second Cambridge Company" charged by James I of England with translating the Apocrypha for the King James Version of the Bible. As well as his own work, he assisted in the work of the "First Cambridge Company" translating from Chronicles to Canticles. Six years later, when the work was done, the different translations were reviewed by six scholars for the final publication. Bois was one of their number. The Bible was then published in 1611.
Although there are more than 40,000 Chinese characters in written Chinese, many are rarely used. Studies have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.
Prior to the alphabetically arranged "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary", virtually every Chinese dictionary was based upon character head entries, arranged either by character shape or pronunciation, that subsume words and phrases written with that head character as the first syllable. While pronunciation determines the placement of words within the unconventional "ABC Dictionary", Chinese characters still determine the position of words within a standard dictionary. Comparing a Chinese character-based dictionary with the pinyin-based "ABC Dictionary" illustrates the difference. "The Chinese–English Dictionary" (Wu 1979: 431) locates the head character entry "lín" 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② circles …" as one of 14 characters pronounced "lín", and alphabetically lists 17 words with "lín" as the first syllable, for instance, "línchǎnpǐn" 林产品 "forest products", "línhǎi" 林海 "immense forest", and "línyè" 林業 "forestry". The "ABC Dictionary" includes "lín" 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② forestry…" as one of 6 characters pronounced "lín", followed by alphabetically listed "lin"-initial headwords from "línbā" 淋巴 "lymph" to "línfēng" 臨風 "facing against the wind", but then "ling"-initial words begin to appear with "líng" 〇 "zero", and only after another three pages will one find "lìngzūn" 令尊 "(courteous) your father" followed by "línhǎi" "immense forest" (McGinnis 1997: 568). DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" is aptly described as having "defied the tyranny of Chinese characters" (Clark 2001: 387).
Although the War Department dictionary was never widely distributed or used, it affected Chao's and Yang's "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese", and served as the model for two well-known dictionaries. Yale University's Institute of Far Eastern Languages published a revised edition "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" (1966), and Fred Fangyu Wang published a two-volume "Mandarin Chinese dictionary", Chinese-English (1967) and English-Chinese (1971). With these dictionaries, "American efforts in Chinese lexicography effectively ceased" (Norman 1988: 176)—until the "ABC Chinese-English Dictionary" (1996).
The dictionary contains an electronic version of the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary by John DeFrancis and the Shuowen Jiezi seal character dictionary. The current version (4.3.2) contains more than 300,000 Chinese-English entries and over 60,000 English-Chinese entries.. It allows users to search for Chinese characters or words by inputting either Chinese characters or pinyin using a variety of input options, including handwriting recognition. Users can update existing entries add new definitions to the dictionary. The program can also be extended with additional data modules, such as the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese.
Several evaluations of the "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" mention cases in which using the alphabetically-arranged headword entries is more efficient than using a conventionally arranged dictionary with character head entries that list words written with that character as the first. Robert S. Bauer, a linguist of Cantonese at Hong Kong Polytechnic University says the dictionary works best when users hear a word pronounced but do not know how to write it in characters, they can very quickly look it up in pinyin order and find the correct characters and meanings. However, to look up an unknown character's pronunciation and meaning, then one needs to use a radical-indexed dictionary. Bauer says "I have generally succeeded in finding almost all the words and expressions I have tried to look up; this I regard as quite remarkable since I cannot say the same about other dictionaries I have been consulting over my more than 25 years of working on Chinese." (1997: 308). Sean Jensen says alphabetical collation is "truly iconoclastic" in the tradition-rich world of Chinese lexicography and describes experimenting with using the dictionary.
I am used to the "old style" dictionaries based on radicals, and I was disposed to approach the "ABC Dictionary" with some skepticism. But having used it for two months I have so(sic) say that it is nothing short of wonderful! It is a pleasure to be able to use a Chinese dictionary in the same way that one uses a French or German dictionary. The typography is exceptionally clear, and the sheer quantity of words per page, arranged alphabetically, has the effect of bringing the melodies of spoken Chinese alive. (1998: 144) 
Michael Sawer, professor of Chinese at the University of Canberra, says using the "ABC Dictionary" does not make it easy to quickly find all the words beginning with the same Chinese character; but it does enable readers to easily find all those pronounced the same (disregarding tonal differences), as well as which among homophonous words is used most frequently (2001: 224).