“An important landmark in the history of Chinese lexicography. Among its many achievements, it is going to play an important role in the standardization of pinyin orthography.” —Modern Language Journal (89, 2005)

“Excellent ... An outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries.” —China Review International (fall 2004)

This dictionary is an expansion of the ground breaking ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, the first strictly alphabetically ordered and Pinyin computerized dictionary. It contains over 196,000 entries, compared to the 71,486 entries of the earlier work, making it the most comprehensive one-volume dictionary of Chinese. The single-sort alphabetic order of the entries provides by far the simplest and fastest way to look up a term whose pronunciation is known. Radical charts help locate characters when the pronunciation of a term is not known and facilitate access to traditional, simplified, and variant forms of characters.

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was emeritus professor of Chinese at the University of Hawai`i.