Help

Dictionary

Type anything into the search box. It can be Chinese, pinyin or English, and it can work with characters, words or sentences.

Modes

"Auto" works well most of the time, but sometimes you might want more control over how it searches.

Auto

This is a combined Chinese/pinyin/English mode that looks for entries in the dictionary that contain the search term in Chinese, pinyin or English according to the descriptions of the modes below. It shows everything it finds, sorted by popularity. If the search term doesn't exist in the dictionary, then it looks for Chinese words in the search term, which is how the Chinese sentence mode works.

Chinese

It only looks for the search term in the Chinese. This is useful, for example, if you want to find Chinese words containing 个, as this character frequently occurs in definitions.

Pinyin

It only looks for the search term in the pinyin. This is not case sensitive and ignores tones. There isn't currently a way of searching for tones.

English

It only looks for the search term in the English definition. This is not case sensitive. If you want to match a word exactly, put a "/" at the beginning and/or end (i.e., "/cat/" or "/to find").

Chinese (sentence)

It looks for all Chinese words that are contained in the search term. Words are sorted by their position in the sentence. This will normally include words that aren't intended by the sentence because computers aren't very good at segmenting text so it's a better option to show all the words and let you work out which are intended.

Tip: to force this mode when in "auto", add a space at the end.

Results

The frequency that many words appear in Chinese is indicated by a small bar. Words that are part of HSK 2.0 are also indicated with their level number.

Contact

Data sources

This project relies on a number of projects for its data.

CEDICT

This is the Chinese–English dictionary this project uses.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Word frequency list

Word frequency comes from this project, which counts how often Chinese words appear in about 191 million words from subtitles files.

There are a few caveats with this. Segmenting Chinese text automatically is hard and not completely accurate, and many entries in the dictionary consist of multiple words that would be segmented in a way so they aren't in this list. This list also doesn't differentiate between different uses of the same Chinese word.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.