"Initially, I just wanted to invent a new dictionary," he said. He realized when he was a student that the design of dictionaries was far less scientific than it is now. It often took three or four minutes to find an unfamiliar character in the dictionary. At that time, he thought that when he grew up, he would design a new way to look up characters and invent a new dictionary so that everyone could find characters more conveniently. In 1972, he began to focus his spare time on the anticipated method of looking up characters, trying to use factors such as radicals and strokes of Chinese characters more cleverly. From the initial idea to testing each character one by one, he was busy every night until after 10 o'clock. Even after lying down, he was still practicing character lookup in his mind. "During that period, I was like being possessed, and I don't know how many draft papers I used." After 15 years, he finally settled on the method for looking up characters and designed the dictionary. Later, because he needed to self-finance 80,000 to 100,000 yuan to publish it, he had to put the matter on hold due to his poor family circumstances.