Abstract: This article takes the Grand Chinese Dictionary and ZhonghuaZihai as clues to explain some difficult characters included in the large-scale dictionaries “Gongbu” of previous dynasties.The difficult characters tested mainly include interpretation errors,unclear interpretations,misclassification of meanings,phonetic errors,identification errors with variant characters,indistinguishable homographs,lack of communication between colloquial and erroneous characters,and the possibility of supplementing and correcting existing explanations.

Key words: large-scale dictionary, “Gongbu”, knotty Chinese characters, textual research