Talk:董
Academia Sinica Entry[edit]
The excellent Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, gives:
1. Inspector; supervision. 2. Being, keeping right. 3. Solid, deep. 4. Ancient place names. In the Spring and Autumn Period, Jindi was in the territory of Wanrong County, Shanxi Province. 5. Last name. 6. [Dong Dong] also made "all kinds". Short appearance.
My own guess, just from the contexts I've seen, would have been "respected" or something of the sort. I think this would have landed me between their 2 and 3, above, and these seem to me to cover modern usages. The first one, "inspector; supervision" rather seems to me to be one more data point about what the learned of Europe were thinking about China in Victorian times.
The URL is http://chardb.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ but this just gets you their (rather learned and thoroughly intelligent) word of the day. Click on the faint "home" and other entries at the bottom of that page to go further.