Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, compiled by the linguist and author Lin Yutang, contains over 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 words and phrases, including many neologisms. Lin's dictionary made two lexicographical innovations, neither of which became widely used. Collation is based on his graphical "Instant Index System" that assigns numbers to Chinese characters based on 33 basic calligraphic stroke patterns. Romanization of Chinese is by Lin's "Simplified National Romanization System", which he developed as a prototype for the Gwoyeu Romatzyh or "National Romanization" system adopted by the Chinese government in 1928. Lin's bilingual dictionary continues to be used in the present day, particularly the free online version that the Chinese University of Hong Kong established in 1999.
History
Lin Yutang (1895-1976) was an influential Chinese scholar, linguist, educator, inventor, translator, and author of works in Chinese and English.
Lin's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage was his second lexicographical effort. From 1932 to 1937, he compiled a 65-volume monolingual Chinese dictionary that was destroyed by Japanese troops during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, except for 13 volumes that he had shipped earlier to New York.
Lin Yutang's "Instant Index System" for characters inspired his invention of the Ming Kwai Chinese typewriter in 1946. Users would input a character by pressing two keys based upon the 33 basic stroke formations, which Lin called "letters of the Chinese Alphabet".
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage was the first major Chinese‐English dictionary to be produced by a fully bilingual Chinese instead of by Western missionaries. In the history of Chinese lexicography, missionaries dominated the first century of Chinese‐English dictionaries, from Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815-1823) to Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary (1931, 1943).
In the period between Mathews' and Lin's dictionaries, both the Chinese and English vocabularies underwent radical changes in terminology for fields such as popular culture, economics, politics, science, and technology. Lin's dictionary included many neologisms and loanwords not found in Mathews', for example (in pinyin), yuánzǐdàn 原子彈 " atomic bomb", hépíng gòngchǔ 和平共處 "peaceful coexistence", xị̌nǎo 洗腦 "brainwash", tàikōngrén 太空人 "astronaut", yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll", and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".
The history of Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage began in late 1965, when Lin and Li Choh-ming, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, made plans for compiling a new Chinese-English dictionary as a "lasting contribution to knowledge". When the dictionary was published, Lin acknowledged that Li's "vision and enthusiastic support" made the compilation project possible. Lin started working on the dictionary in Taipei, and in the spring of 1967, he accepted the position of Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After completing the manuscript in the spring of 1971, Lin moved to Hong Kong, where his former student Francis Pan and a team of young Chinese University graduates assisted him with copyediting, research, and final preparations.
Li Choh-ming also contributed the dictionary's foreword (in Chinese and English) and title Chinese calligraphy seen on the cover. Li says that a good Chinese-English dictionary should provide an "idiomatic equivalence" of terms in the two languages, and derides previous dictionaries for rendering fèitiě 廢鐵 as "old iron" when it should "obviously" be "scrap iron". However, old iron is perfectly good British English usage.
This first edition was bilingually titled Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage or Dāngdài Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn (當代漢英詞典). Sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, this book was printed in Japan by Kenkyūsha, which is known for publishing high-quality dictionaries, and was distributed by McGraw-Hill in the United States. The original edition included three indexes: Lin's idiosyncratic "instant" index for looking up traditional Chinese characters, an alphabetical English index, and an index of about 2,000 simplified Chinese characters. However, many users unfamiliar with Lin's character indexing system found the dictionary difficult to use, which led to the following supplement.
In 1978, The Chinese University Press published the Supplementary index to Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage or Lín Yǔtáng dāngdài Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn zēng biān suǒyǐn (林語堂當代漢英詞典增編索引), which indexed by Wade-Giles romanization and by the 214 Kangxi radicals.