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Abstract

Sometime around the year 589, the scholar Lu Deming 陸德明 presented to the Chinese imperial library a new and important work: his Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文, or "Glosses on the Classics". It contained Lu's word-by-word exegeses, glosses and phonetic annotations (in the form of fanqie 反切 phonetic spellings) of fourteen of the greatest classics of ancient China. As the Jingdian shiwen predates all known extant Chinese rhyme dictionaries, it contains a wealth of extremely valuable information for modem scholars and linguists. Unfortunately, the Jingdian shiwen has remained largely understudied, partly because it was composed in an expository style (rather than as a dictionary), and partly because until now the only proofed digital edition of the work has been the version included in the digital Siku quanshu 四庫全書 collectanea, accessible solely by subscription and via its own user interface which presents very limited search options. Our project has thus been to create a plain-text Unicode edition of the entire Jingdian shiwen (all 30 volumes), fully annotated, systematized and designed specifically for inclusion in the online Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (edoc.uchicago.edu) database so scholars will begin to be able to do targeted searches of its contents and compare Lu Deming's glosses and exegeses with those of other early Chinese dictionaries and reference works.

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