CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 11: Dictionaries and Dictionary Software

Indexing radicals with ambiguous stroke countsTable 11-4.

Indexing radical Stroke counts Reason for discrepancy

󲊟

2 or 3 Dierent ways to write indexing radical

󲌬󲉑

3 or 4 Dierent number of strokes

󲄺

4 or 5 Variations

Good dictionaries include ideographs with ambiguous stroke counts in all applicable

stroke-count groups or, at the very least, provide adequate cross-references.

Some character set standards, specically Big Five and the rst seven planes of CNS

11643-2007, order ideographs by total number of strokes, then by indexing radical.

Other Indexes

While reading, radical, and stroke count indexes are the most commonly found in ideo-

graph dictionaries, they are not necessarily the most ecient in terms of lookup speed.

Other useful or proven indexes include Jack Halpern’s SKIP, the Four Corner method, and

the character codes themselves.

SKIP

One particularly ecient ideograph index method is known as SKIP (System of Kanji In-

dexing by Patterns), developed and patented by Jack Halpern (󱷂 harupen jakku),

implemented in his own dictionaries for the ordering of the main entries, and included

(by permission) in Jim Breen’s KANJIDIC le (described later in this chapter). In fact,

KANJIDIC includes SKIP codes for all JIS X 0208:1997 kanji, not only those that appear

in Jack Halpern’s New Japanese-English ...