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Compilation started in September, 1986. First placed on the Internet on July 15, 1995. Updated daily based on user contributions.
This dictionary-database represents the ongoing results of 20 full years of research in East Asian pre-modern texts, from Zhou dynasty materials to nineteenth-century writings in China, Korea and Japan. Including information on Chinese terminology derived from Confucianism, Daoism, secular literature, poetry, and historical works. Originally, this compilation, and the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism were initiated as a single compilation, but were eventually separated to encourage specialized usage and participation in experts from both classical Chinese and Buddhist studies sub-specialties.
Besides its inherent digital attributes, this dictionary already surpasses many of its hard-copy counterpart dictionaries in a number of ways. The number of single characters contained in the database is 20,902 — the entire CJK portion of Unicode 1.0. As of 2/17/01, about half of these contained complete information, along with 8,000 compound words. The definitions contained in this dictionary are, for the most part, far more extensive than any other current CJKV-English dictionary, being derived from a wide range of authoritative Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese lexicons as well as through the direct reading of primary textual sources.
While a number of the Japanese-oriented modern kanji dictionaries which have appeared during recent decades have been of high quality in terms of precision within their respective purviews, they are, from the perspective of the classical scholar, limited in their scope and orientation to modern vocabulary, and thus are not that useful to those who are doing scholarly research/translation of pre-modern han-wen texts, who need to know all of the ancient semantic implementations and readings of a particular character, along with extensive pre-modern compounds.Therefore, the present work is intended to serve to fill the dearth in Western lexicographical resources on traditional East Asian language, literature, history, philosophy and religion. We strongly encourage those who are doing research in any form of pre-modern Chinese literature, philosophy, and history to become involved in this project by contributing precise materials from your research.
We have established a password/quota system in order to: (a) encourage regular users to feel a sense of responsibility to make their own contributions to this shared resource, and (b) block access by abusers of the dictionaries who send in search robots to download all of the data (which, in the process, obstruct access by honest users). This system operates at two levels:
(1) Limited Use (no user contribution): Any user may access the dictionary by entering "guest" as the username with no password. This will allow a total of 5 searches in each of the DDB and CJKV-E dictionaries in a 24-hour period.
(2) Unlimited Use (user contribution): While our most basic aim in putting these dictionaries on the web is to make this material readily available to everyone, the larger purpose of this project is to bring about a collaborative effort that will lead to the eventual development of a comprehensive body of data. In order to accomplish this, we need contributions toward content development from users. Thus, you may obtain an unlimited-use password by becoming a contributor to the CJKV-English Dictionary. For details, see here.
(3) Unlimited Use (paid subscription): Those who are unable to make a contribution, but need unlimited access may pay for a two-year subscription to the CJKV-E and DDB dictionaries, at the rate of U.S. $110 for individuals and U.S. $500 for institutions. Please write to acmuller@pair.com for information. [Supporting Institutions]