A shot of the third edition of the Ci Yuan dictionary. [Photo/dangdang.com]

The third edition of the Ci Yuan dictionary was launched in Beijing yesterday. The book underwent eight years of revision by hundreds of scholars, collecting 14,210 Chinese characters, 92,646 polysyllabic words and about 1,000 illustrations. The new edition revised 40% of the second version, including the change of 40,000 paraphrases and examples.

Published by the Commercial Press in 1915, Ci Yuan is the first contemporary dictionary in China. It sets a good example for the compilation of Chinese dictionaries in modern times by collecting the words about traditional culture and modern science and technology.

After the 1983 revision, the second edition became an ancient Chinese dictionary specializing in encyclopedic knowledge of words, allusions, prose and verse, history, geography and cultural relics.

The third revision started in 2007 to meet changes in recent years. Experts and scholars from hundreds of colleges and universities participated in the project. The second edition was revised in terms of character pattern, phonetic notation, paraphrase and illustration.