方言

"方言" by Xiong Yang is a Chinese dictionary compiled in the early 1st century CE. It was the first Chinese dictionary to document significant regional vocabulary from across China. Yang Xiong spent 27 years collecting regionalisms from various sources, including imperial surveys that recorded folk songs and idioms from distant regions. The work originally contained 9,000 characters across 15 chapters, with entries listing regional synonyms for words. Modern scholars have used its dialect data to reconstruct ancient Chinese pronunciation.

Summary written by Project Gutenberg, by machine.