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In article <1026@dcl-cs.UUCP> craig@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Craig Wylie) writes:
>I have seen some English Chinese dictionaries that use the number of strokes
>in the character to sort.

There are two common lexicographic orderings for Chinese dictionaries:

1. Sorted by major radical, then by number of strokes. The radicals are
also sorted by number of strokes (I don't remember what to do for
ties).  Thus words to do with "wood" come before words to do with
"metal" because "metal" (really "gold", the king of metals) has more
strokes.

2. The Four Corner Digit method. There are 10 classes of strokes and
the four corners are assigned digits corresponding to the nearest
stroke.  Then one uses the 4 digit number to index into the dictionary.
A fifth digit is sometimes used to disambiguate. A lot like hashing.

I prefer the second method because it is fast (for me, but I was
regarded as a radical [pun intended] when I used a FCD dictionary in
school ages ago).  The disadvantage is that unrelated words will sort
together. For this reason the traditional radical sort is used for
phone books, etc.

	Ken
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