CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

655

CHAPTER 11

Dictionaries and Dictionary Software

Everyone, or nearly everyone, reading this book may be wondering why there is even

mention of—let alone a dedicated chapter for—dictionaries in a book about information

processing. e usefulness of dictionaries should become painfully obvious once you give

it some thought: dictionaries, in a variety of forms, provide users and developers the abil-

ity to locate information about characters and words. For most CJKV locales, this usually

entails meaningful sequences of two of more ideographs in word dictionaries, and some-

times for individual ideographs in character dictionaries. Armed with the ability to rap-

idly and conveniently access information about words and the ideographs that are used to

compose them—or to be able to access this type of information at all—makes using and

developing soware a much more pleasant experience.

Dictionaries play an especially important role during text input. As covered in Chapter 5,

the ability to enter ideographs is governed by the use of appropriate dictionaries, which

provide input methods with the ability to convert transliterated or other native scripts

into sequences of one or more ideographs.

Word and character dictionaries come in many forms. Traditionally, they are printed on

paper and bound into a book-like format. Some contain so much information that they

are published as several volumes. ...