Last week the eleventh edition of the mammoth Xinhua Dictionary,  China's official compendium of the Mandarin language was released. As Chinese  learner’s indispensable reference book, the 711-page tome is the world's  best-selling dictionary, with over 400 million copies printed since it launched  in 1953.
  Your Chinese teachers must  have recommended it to you. When previewing a new Chinese lesson, you  will find things get easier with the help of a Xinhua Dictionary. In the early  days, it was like the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary  rolled into one, teaching a mostly illiterate country about everything from  umbrellas to fertilizer to how to write the word "pigeon." A 1971  edition, published at the height of the Cultural Revolution, contained 46 of Mao's  proclamations, which many readers already knew by heart. Today, competing  publishers release numerous alternative dictionaries, but the Xinhua edition  remains a staple of most schools.
  In many languages, there are disagreements about whether  dictionaries should standardize how language should be used, or reflect how  language is used. The Xinhua Dictionary contains far more words that actually  reflect how language is used than in previous editions, yet it still omits  sensitive entries. There is unsurprisingly no entry for the Tiananmen Massacre  , but it also leaves out shengnv("Leftover Ladies" a common term  which refers to ageing, unmarried women) and the reappropriation of the word  "comrade" to mean gay. "We abandoned these words because it's kind  of rude to label this group," Jiang Lansheng, a linguistics expert from  the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was responsible for the revisions,  told Chinese Central Television. As a result, it will be a satisfying tool for  your Chinese learning.
  So what does the new edition, compiled over seven years and  featuring more than 3, 000 new words and expressions, include? Many of the new  entries are deeply vernacular, originating from Internet memes, tabloid  scandals, and other informal sources. Some, like boke (blog), and tuangou  (onlinegroup shopping, along the lines of Groupon) reflect today's new, digital  world. Others, like fenqing(nationalists, literally "angry youth")  and xiangjiao ren (banana person, which usually refers to Chinese-Americans --  yellow on the outside, white on the inside -- though unlike in the United  States this is not pejorative), are names for new social categories and  subcultures that have emerged.
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