Comparative Studies Of The 4th And 5th Edition's Homonyms Of The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary

Language is a social phenomenon,which is developing along with the society.As the most vitality part of the language,vocabulary always keeps the occurrances of new vocabulary creating,old vocabulary disappearing and the meaning of words changing. Contemporary Chinese Dictionary was revised constantly in order to catch the pace of the developing contemporary Chinese because it is a professional dictionary which records contemporary Chinese vocabulary. As a small branch of Contemporary Chinese vocabulary,it has already drawn more and more concern by scholars. Contemporary Chinese Dictionary also gives the status to Homonyms, which distinguishes them by marking numbers in the upper corner of the vocabulary.In this paper, I compared the Homonyms of 4th edition and 5th edition of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary completely and found out 185 groups different Homonyms which were revised in this two versions. I classified the 185 groups Homonyms in three types-"Addition and deletion of the Homonyms", "Adjusting of vocabulary and Interpretation"and"Different Phonetic-Based about Homonyns". Then,I analysed the reasons of classification and why the 5th edition of Contemporary Chinese Dictionary revised them,and analysed some special cases in order to sum up the advantages and disadvantages,which provide some useful help in the next revision.