thumb|Spine of the Commercial Press single-volume 1974 edition The Ciyuan or '''''Tz'u-yüan''' was the first major Chinese dictionary linguistically structured around words (ci ) instead of individual characters (zi ) used to write them. The Commercial Press published the first edition Ciyuan'' in 1915, and reissued it in various formats, including a 1931 supplement, and a fully revised 1979–1984 edition. The latest (3rd) edition was issued in 2015 to commemorate the centenary anniversary of its first publication.
thumb|Spine of the Commercial Press single-volume 1974 edition The Ciyuan or '''''Tz'u-yüan''' was the first major Chinese dictionary linguistically structured around words (ci ) instead of individual characters (zi ) used to write them. The Commercial Press published the first edition Ciyuan in 1915, and reissued it in various formats, including a 1931 supplement, and a fully revised 1979–1984 edition. The latest (3rd) edition was issued in 2015 to commemorate the centenary anniversary of its first publication.
==Contents and significance== In Chinese terminology, the Ciyuan is a cidian ( "word/phrase dictionary") for spoken or written expressions, as opposed to a zidian (, lit. "character/logograph dictionary") for written Chinese characters. A character dictionary contains only the definition(s) and pronunciation(s) for a character in isolation, whereas a dictionary of words contains both individual characters and characters in words. Whereas a dictionary of discrete characters would have separate entries for zi (, "character") and dian (, "canon; standard"), it would not enter the compound zidian (, "dictionary"); a dictionary of words would include entries for zi, dian, and zidian. The Chinese language, both written and spoken, is primarily made up of words and phrases, not independent characters.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).