Mei was born in Xuancheng, Anhui. Imperial academy, a university student in Ming Dynasty, is known as "the pioneer of ancient dictionary style". I spent my whole life in the sea of books and wrote all kinds of books. Vocabulary is the most famous book, and it is a rare book in China.
Personal works: This dictionary has made a major reform on Shuowen Jiezi, combining its 540 radicals into 265,438+04, and arranging radicals and words according to the number of strokes for the first time, making the dictionary popular, practical and easy to look up.
The dictionary has a total of 14 volumes and 33 179 words, which breaks through the traditional prejudice of "belittling vulgarity" and "emphasizing correctness", adopts the principle of "accepting both righteousness and vulgarity", retains a large number of ancient and modern vulgar words, and properly selects and collects words that have not been collected or missed in dictionaries of past dynasties. Some words are found in Kangxi Dictionary and China University.
There are various appendices in Dictionaries, such as Rhyme, From Ancient Times to the Present, On Time, Universal in Ancient Times, Chinese Character Search, Similarity Discrimination, Awakening Mistakes, Rhyme Straight Diagram and Rhyme Horizontal Diagram, which tell readers to write, read and understand Chinese characters correctly from different aspects. For example, Cloud Pen contains 73 words with different shapes, and the writing order of each word is marked one by one, which is convenient for readers to draw inferences and cultivate the correct writing order.
The 500 words and 265 groups of strokes listed in Bian Xiang are slightly different in shape, so they are marked with sound and meaning or clearly written to show the difference. "Woke up by mistake" lists some words that are easily misspelled or engraved in the workshop, such as "misreading" cup ",which means" the sound is the same as the hand "and" cup "is a wine vessel; "From ancient times", "at present" and "universal in ancient and modern times" respectively point out which words should be written in ancient Chinese, which words should be written in the popular way at that time, which words can have both, and so on.
From this, we can see the evolution of Chinese characters and provide reference for writers. Before Kangxi Dictionary came out, Dictionary was the only complete dictionary in ancient China. The original edition was collected by Hangzhou Antique Bookstore and regarded as a rare book.