Abstract: Using the textual research methods of “mutual seeking of five aspects of form,application meaning,sound,and order” and taking Grand Chinese Dictionary and ZhonghuaZihai as the clue,we try to make a sequent investigation on 20 knotty characters in the large-sized dictionaries.Our textual research includes those corrupt glyph,those without being corrected according to orthography,those that make mistakes in the identification of variant characters,those with unclear pronunciation or wrong phonetic notation,those with unclear meaning or wrong interpretation,those which do not discriminate homographs,and those whose textual research can be discussed.

Key words: large dictionary, knotty Chinese characters, textual research