Chinese-English Dictionary

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Intro

This Chinese/English dictionary provides a searchable interface for the CEDICT dictionary originally put together by Paul Denisowksi. Searches can be conducted by Chinese (using either the GB, Big5, or Unicode encodings), pinyin, or English. Results will show the Chinese word, the pinyin representation of the word, and the English definition.

Some points to remember when using this dictionary:

• You can download the dictionary data at the CEDICT website.
• This dictionary is only for words. It will not have phrases (such as "I love you") or names. If you want to find out what your name is in Chinese, please use the Chinese Name Tool.
• Pin yin must have spaces between syllables. Tone numbers are not required (but can help). Only Hanyu pinyin works, Wade-Giles and Yale will not work.
• Case is not important.
• The dictionary is not a translator. It will not translate sentences.
• Make sure your query is spelt correctly.
• There is no profanity in the dictionary.

For a off-line way to search the dictionary, please check out DimSum Chinese Tool.

When searching by Chinese you can tell the dictionary to find entries that start with the characters, end with the characters, or have the characters anywhere within the final word. You can also ask to only return the Chinese entries that exactly match the word being sought.

When searching by pinyin, you must include a space between the different pinyin syllables. You can include or exclude tone numbers (1-4 and 5 for the neutral tone). For example, if you were looking for the word for television set, you would type "dian shi ji" or "dian4 shi4 ji1" or "dian shi4 ji" (but without the quotes). All would work. But remember to include the space and set the dictionary to look for pinyin, and not Chinese characters or English. As with the Chinese characters, you can direct the dictionary to find entries that have the pinyin at the beginning, end, anywhere, or as the whole entry. You can return the results in GB, Big5 or UTF-8 Unicode.

When searching by English, searches are not case sensitive. Since this is designed as mainly an Chinese to English and not English to Chinese dictionary, if you can't find the word you are looking for, you may be able to find it using a synonym. Also, you may get many unrelated entries that use the word in the English definition but do not give the equivalent Chinese for it.

To search by radical/stroke order, please use the Character Dictionary. You can search using a table of radicals and the remaining stroke count of a character. From the list of characters that are returned, you can click on the character to get a list of all words in the dictionary that start with that character. This will only work however if the results are set to be returned as GB, Big5 or Unicode and not as GIF's.

If you encounter problems, please make sure that you are searching by the correct field. For instance, if you are looking by the English word "computer", make sure you are searching by English and not pinyin or characters.

You can check out other great Chinese tools on Erik Peterson's MandarinTools website, or if you have any questions or suggestions please visit his guestbook.

Hey Dude, Where's My Dictionary?

On Wednesday 1st March we upgraded the MonashWushu website to WebGUI. This is what happened when Patrick forgot to bring across the ChineseEnglish dictionary from the old site:

^{Hello, sorry to bother you.
Some time ago, (over a year) I stumbled upon the chinese-english dictionary on your site. This was the best dictionary I was ever able to find online, and more accurate and thorough than my best hand-held dictionary.
When i went to use it today from my bookmarks, it was no longer there.
I was wondering if the dictionary site is still online, and if-so  where(URL) I might find it? If it is no longer online, let me tell you that it is truly a loss to the chinese-learning english speakers, as I also have many classmates who use your dictionary for things while online.
Thanks for your response,
-Aaron}

 It's back now Aaron!

 UPDATE (14 March, 2006) - I've fixed a bug where old search results were being cached by the web server (so new searches returned old results). The emails keep flooding in, we had no idea so many people use this online dictionary!

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