A Chinese–English Dictionary: Compiled for the China Inland Mission by R. H. Mathews or Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary, edited by the Australian Congregationalist missionary Robert Henry Mathews (1877–1970), was the standard Chinese–English dictionary for decades. Mathews originally intended his dictionary to be a revision of Frederick W. Baller's out-of-print An Analytical Chinese–English Dictionary, but ended up compiling a new dictionary. Mathews copied, without acknowledgment, from the two editions of Herbert Giles's A Chinese–English Dictionary.

There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: 'character dictionaries' list individual Chinese characters, and 'word dictionaries' list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have developed a number of methods to order and sort characters to facilitate more convenient reference.