Lexicon

The Shuhai Wenyuan Lexicon has been designed to provide users with a way to determine what a term in a text may mean. There is no better way to understand the meaning of a term than to examine its use in an actual text, and outside of that a dictionary can help by suggesting meanings that occur in other texts. The stumbling block of a bilingual dictionary, however, it that the meanings suggested are, as translations, approximations of meanings, and so the reader is yet another step removed from the actual meaning of a term in the text in question. Under normal circumstances, this is not necessarily a perilous obstacle, but when reading texts from a vastly different culture that takes for granted philosophical positions that a Westerner will find alien and unintuitive, it becomes imperative that one consider more than the dictionary definition when interpreting terms. For this reason, Shuhai Wenyuan provides not only dictionary definitions but full texts and a search engine to locate particular terms in other contexts, translations, a grammar, and a number of lexical resources that together allow users to plumb the meanings of Classical Chinese terms beyond simply labeling them with facile English equivalents and exclaiming, "I've got it".

The Shuhai Wenyuan Lexicon contains the following: