Wanting an improvement upon earlier dictionaries, as well as to show his concern for Confucian culture and to foster standardization of the Chinese writing system, its compilation was ordered by the Kangxi Emperor in 1710, from whom the compendium gets its name.

[2] The text is available in many forms, from Qing dynasty block print editions, to reprints using traditional Chinese bookbinding, to Western-style hardcovers including revisions and ancillary essays, to a digitized version accessible via the internet.

[2] Classical Chinese is largely morphosyllabic with very few bound morphemes, meaning that most individual characters represented independent words.

The compilation was based partly on two Ming dynasty dictionaries: the 1615 Zihui by Mei Yingzuo, and the 1627 Zhengzitong by Zhang Zilie.

The character entries provide definitions and pronunciations in both traditional fanqie spelling and with a modern homophone, as well as example quotations from the Chinese corpus, and lists of any variants and differing meanings.