Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants

The Ministry of Education appointed the Department of Chinese, National Taiwan Normal University to make a table of Chinese character variants. This table has been published for many years, and widely used by all circles. However, people have pointed out that it does not show the origins of characters and some handwritten characters are not clear. In order to meet the demands of Mandarin teaching and inner code increasing of the Chinese language information, we need to assort and enlarge the table again and expand the reference usages of each word. So on one hand, it can be a reference resource for Mandarin teaching in our country; on the other hand, it can be encoded by the Institute For Information Industry as the standard interchange codes and then registered in ISO. In this way, we will not miss playing a role while Mainland China, Korea, and Japan are in keen competition enlarging the set of internationally used Chinese characters.

In Sep, 1994, Professor Chen Hsin-hsiung of the Department of Chinese, National Taiwan Normal University was invited to attend gthe International Conference of Daily Chinese Characters in Asian Chinese Character Cultureh sponsored by International Chinese Character Revival Association. As the simplified characters of Communist China are not in accord with the traditional Chinese characters, all the participants in the conference are requested to discuss and establish the common character forms on the basis of currently used characters, and then to have them standardized and unified so that it easy for people to communicate and exchange information. Therefore, Professor Chen suggested our ministry to compile a dictionary of Chinese character variants. As it is necessary to have Chinese characters standardized and unified, the Mandarin Promotion Council (MPC), Ministry of Education) is responsible for this. In the 84th meeting of the standing council on Feb. 21, 1995, the plan of compiling a dictionary of character variants was proposed and approved. It would take six years (from July, 1 1995 to June 30 2000) to sort character books and documents and establish a character file. Accordingly, we will revise the table of Chinese character variants we have had and compile a brand-new dictionary of Chinese character variants.

The dictionary has been finished on June, 2001, and total contains over 100,000 character variants.

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