The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710 and it was published in 1716. The dictionary is named after the Emperor's era name.

Although the dictionary contains over 47,000 characters, less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.
 
The Kangxi Dictionary editors, including Zhang Yushu(张玉书) and Chen Tingjing(陈廷敬), partly based it on two Ming Dynasty dictionaries: the 1615 Zihui(字汇) by Mei Yingzuo(梅应作), and the 1627 Zhengzitong(正字通) by Zhang Zilie(张自烈). Since the imperial edict required that the Kangxi Dictionary be compiled within five years, a number of errors were inevitable. The Daoguang Emperor established a review board and their 1831 Zidian kaozheng(字典考证) corrected 2,588 mistakes, mostly in quotations and citations.

The supplemented dictionary contains 47,035 character entries, plus 1,995 graphic variants, giving a total of 49,030 different characters. They are grouped under the 214 radicals and arranged by the number of additional strokes in the character. Although these 214 radicals were first used in the Zihui, due to the popularity of the Kangxi Dictionary they are known as Kangxi radicals and remain in modern usage as a method to categorize traditional Chinese characters.

The character entries give variants, pronunciations in traditional fanqie spelling and in modern reading of a homophone, different meanings, and quotations from Chinese books and lexicons. The dictionary also contains rime tables with characters ordered under syllable rime classes, tones, and initial syllable onsets.

The Kangxi Dictionary is available in many forms, from old Qing Dynasty editions in block printing, to reprints in traditional Chinese bookbinding, to modern revised editions with essays in Western-style hardcover, to the digitized Internet version.

The Kangxi Dictionary is one of the Chinese dictionaries used by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group for the Unicode standard.