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WORD LISTS AND ONLINE GLOSSARIES/DICTIONARIES

This UTF8-encoded webpage is placed in the ChinaLinks.osu.edu site (as of 05.15.04). This page has links to web-accessible resources for (Mandarin) Chinese. For comparative purposes, online resources for Japanese are also included here. This webpage was originally created for presentation at the first Workshop on Chinese Online Reading Assistant1 (CORA), held on 12-13 October 1996 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. New links are added from time to time, often based on helpful tips and suggestions from websurfers and subscribers posting to the Chinese mailing list <chinese@kenyon.edu>. For online glossaries and dictionaries on other Chinese dialects, see the Chinese Dialectology section of my ChinaLinks (ChinaLinks.osu.edu). For links to English and other language dictionaries -- which may also include Mandarin as well as Cantonese and other Chinese dialects -- see the section of my ChinaLinks under Online General Reference Tools. For a brief, informative history of Chinese dictionaries, see Chinese Dictionaries. For additional resources, search my webpages (that is, my ChinaLinks pages as well as my other webpages, including some bibliographies, course syllabi, etc.) via a Simple Search (top right corner of this page) -- or via an Advanced Search (separate webpage) -- both powered by Google.

It takes time to maintain working links on a webpage. From time to time, a link provided below becomes dead. In cases where a webpage is now defunct and cannot be located using a search engine (e.g., Google), try the internet archive, WayBack Machine (thanks to Ben Jones). Happy web-browsing!


Top 1. CHINESE WORD LISTS/DICTIONARIES ON THE WEB   (Downloadable unless indicated otherwise.)

  1. "A Review of Chinese word lists accessible on the internet"
    Chih-Hao Tsai (蔡志浩) collected five word lists and integrated them to form a sixth word list ("Tsai's List of Chinese Words"), which contains 137,450 unique entries in Big5 code. More word lists have been added since. (Link updated 04.12.01 thanks to Joerg Sziegat.)

  2. Chinese Character Frequency Lists and Diagrams.
    The frequency lists (GB-encoded and in HMTL format) are generated by Jun Da and form part of his Chinese Text Computing website (link updated 11-10-00). As stated in his webpage, "the corpus of this study consists of 110 megabytes of modern Chinese texts from two types of sources: 1) Various online Chinese e-magazines. They are written and/or adopted for the internet and published only on the internet. 2) Chinese literature and other writings for the general public. The set of data used in this study consists of the ebooks collection of the Xi Yu Si Electronic Library."

  3. Chinese Characters with Pinyin.
    University of Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium provides a list of GB-encoded Chinese characters paired with their Pinyin representations, which is part of the webpage of "Resources on Chinese at LDC." In that list, containing 7,809 entries, characters with more than one Pinyin representation are listed on separate lines. (Added 1.30.02)

  4. English<->Chinese Bilingual Wordlists.
    GB-encoded word lists that are part of the Linguistic Data Consortium's webpage of "Resources on Chinese at LDC." (Added 1.30.02)

  5. Chinese Character Frequency List.
    GB-encoded frequency list of Chinese characters at the Linguistic Data Consortium website. (Added 1.30.02)

  6. CEDICT (Chinese-English Dictionary) Project
    A continuation of Paul Denisowski's Online Dictionary Project, this is Erik Peterson's website for carrying on the dictionary project that was begun by Paul Denisowski that aims towards building a collaborative, downloadable (as opposed to searchable-only), dictionary that is free for non-commercial, individual use. (Original link added 12.16.97; link to Erik Peterson's website created 08.11.00; some wording change thanks to Jerry B.) (GB/Big5)

    CEDICT is also incorporated into Unicode Consortium's online Unihan Database. Other dictionaries used in the Unihan Database include: Kangxi, Morohashi, Dae Jaweon, Hanyu Da Zidian, Nelson, Matthews, Karlgren, Fenn, Cowles, and Meyer-Wempe (with Cowles and Meyer-Wempe for Cantonese pronunciation). (See further details at my ChinaLinks 3 webpage concerning the Unihan Database. Also see the annotated link below to the Unihan Database: Unicode FTP Site.) (Added 09.12.02.)

  7. CJEDictionary (Chinese-Japanese-English Dictionary)
    This is Jeremy Thorpe's freely-downloadable software dictionary for the .NET platform that can be used with such freely-available dictionary databases as Edict (Japanese) and CEDICT (traditional and simplified Chinese). Powerful search functions include search by term, pronunciation, definition, and radical/strokes. (Software required: .NET Framework, a component of the Windows operating system.) (Added 04.25.04.)

  8. Chinese Character Dictionary.
    Front-end software prepared by EuroAsiaSoftware that combines the files from CEDICT (see above) and Unicode's Unihan Database. For English and other non-Chinese Win9x/NT/2000; 9+ MB downloadable file; contains over 35,000 words/expressions; search on English, Pinyin, radical, and number of strokes; includes a simple Chinese text editor and a Pinyin editor. (No external decoder needed.) (Link added 10.22.99, thanks to Stan Goertzen and Don Klein; updated info and URL 08.07.00.)

  9. Chinese-English Database
    Marilyn Shea's searchable database of the vocabulary from the Practical Chinese Reader Series: Books I and II from Beijing Language Institute; built with Paradox. (Updated 06.09.00)
    For bibliographies of published Chinese-related dictionaries, see other webpages maintained by Marilyn Shea. She has an extensive list of English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionaries. Her Chinese Translation Dictionaries is arranged alphabetically by language -- i.e., Chinese dictionaries of various languages, including Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Finnish, Arabic, Tangut etc. She also has a miscellaneous collection of Specialized Dictionaries that are arranged by topic and include, under "Chinese," dictionaries of synonyms, particles, classifiers, and so forth. (Added 10.06.00)

  10. Small Database of Insult Words (謾罵小型資料庫)
    Webpage -- part of Kao Taihsi (高台茜)'s website at National Dong Hwa University -- contains a mini-database of insult words in Chinese in MS Word DOC format (11月工作會報_謾罵小型資料庫(一)901202.doc). (Links added on 1.31.02, thanks to Charles Hammond and Jeffrey J. Hayden) (Big5)

  11. CEL (Chinese-English Lookup)
    Richard Warmington's software for Windows, created to make Paul Denisowski's CEDICT, public-domain electronic Chinese-English dictionary, more accessible. (Link added 7.19.98, URL updated 1.16.01.)

    For an online, searchable interface to CEDICT, see Erik Peterson's Chinese-English Dictionary.

    For off-line, searchable interfaces to CEDICT combined with Unihan, see EuroAsiaSoftware's freely-downloadable Chinese Character Dictionary, Alexander Schonfeld's shareware, CQuickTrans, and the online Unihan Database.

    For Macs, see Konrad Mitchell Lawson's freely-downloadable Fool's Lexicon, which is a Macintosh client for CEDICT, which also supports searching of Jim Breen's EDICT (see screenshots). (Link added 04.17.01)

    For a PalmPilot version, see Mike's freely-downloadable Palm CEDICT. (Link added 04.17.01)

  12. CQuickTrans
    Alexander Schonfeld's shareware for Windows 9x/2000/NT that is a searchable interface to CEDICT combined with the Unihan datbase file; a Chinese dictionary, rudimentary translation aid, and study system integrated into one interface for Chinese character lookup and for producing study lists and flashcards. (Link added 10.25.00)

  13. English-Chinese/Chinese-English Dictionary
    A text file of words and phrases for Windows 95 (Chinese or English Version from Yick Yan Lam (林奕恩). He also has other freely downloadable programs, including an applet, his "Great Calendar 97" (since 5 March 1997), that can calculate the Lunar dates for the years between 1881 and 2059; software for Chinese Input (since 24 Feb 1998); a macro for MS Word (6.0, 7.0 and 97) for converting GB to Big5; etc. (Link updated 12.11.98; URL has moved?)

  14. English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary
    Online searches at Saynihao.org can be conducted using Chinese (GB, Big5, or Unicode), Pinyin, or English. Output is in Chinese orthography, Pinyin romanization, and English meaning. (Link added 07.13.05, thanks to Apollo's posting on the Chinese list.)

  15. IFCSS: Dictionaries.
    Downloadable dictionaries for DOS and earlier versions of Windows from the IFCSS (Independent Federation of Chinese Scholars and Students) website. (IFCSS no longer requires username and pasword. Link added 12.26.00)

  16. Unihan Database: Unicode FTP Site.
    The Unihan database file (Unihan.txt -- 16228 KB as of 10 Sept 1999, and 25685 KB by 27 Mar 2002) is downloadable from Unicode's official (case-sensitive) FTP site. (See also their UnicodeData File Format and their Unicode Character Database for their "Limitations on Rights to Redistribute This Data.") (Link added 10.23.99)

  17. I Ching Lexicon (Yi Jing Cidian)
    Chuck Polisher's online Chinese-English lexicon of the I Ching. Each Hexagram (diagram with 6 lines) in the I Ching is linked to the complete text associated with that hexagram. From the text, every chinese character links to its definition, where related information such as radical, stroke count, tone, Pinyin, and sometimes comparative english translations. (NB: NOT downloadable.) (Link added 10.16.98) (Eng/Big5)

Top 2. CHINESE ONLINE SEARCHABLE DICTIONARIES

  1. Character Dictionary
    Erik Peterson's online searchable Chinese<->/English dictionary; look up by English, Pinyin, radical/stroke, and Cantonese, and obtain print results in GIF, UTF-8 (Unicode), GB (simplified), or Big5 (traditional). Part of Erik Peterson's On-line Chinese Tools. (Link added 11.02.96)

  2. Chinese Characters Dictionary Web
    Rick Harbaugh's website that allows for simultaneous search of major Chinese character dictionaries on the web, including the WWW CJK-English Dictionary (SJIS), the Buddhist Dictionary (JIS), the Cantonese Pronunciation Dictionary (Big5), Taiwanese Dictionary (Big5), Guoyu Cidian (Big5), Thomas Chin's Hakka pronuncing dictionary of Chinese characters, the WWW JDIC (SJIS), the Unicode Unihan database, and RH's Zhongwen Zipu (Chinese Character Genealogy). (Link added 02.10.98.)

  3. Chinese Computer Terminology
    Search Chinese or English keywords online. It is provided by the Hong Kong Computer Society and the Chinese Computer Federation to publicize the official set of computer terms in Chinese published by the Standard Terminology Assessment Committee of China. (This website was renamed from "English-Chinese Computer Terminology". URL updated on 02.10.98.)

  4. Chinese Database
    Sergei Starostin's database of circa 4000 characters; one of several Etymological Databases provided by Sergei Starostin (see his Introduction). (Link added 8.11.98.) (No decoder needed) (English/Russian)

  5. Chinese Dictionary on WWW
    Richard Wong's online searchable Chinese<->English dictionary. English-Chinese portion is Yick Yan Lam's CiYu. (Updated 10.21.98) (Big5, GB)

  6. Chinese-English Dictionary
    Ming-Jen Chan's online searchable dictionary. (Link added 10.14.96.) (Big5)

  7. Chinese-English Dictionary     (Mirror Site A | Mirror Site B)
    Erik Peterson's online, searchable interface to Paul Denisowski's CEDICT. Searches can be conducted using Chinese (GB/Big5/Unicode), Pinyin, or English. Results show the Chinese word, the Pinyin representation of the word, and the English definition. (Link added 7.19.98, mirror sites added 9.1.99.)

  8. Chinese-English Online Dictionary and English-Chinese Dictionary
    Eric Okorie's two online-searchable bilingual dictionaries, with the Chinese character lookup dictionary accepting Big5 input. He also has an online Hanyu Pinyin Lookup Dictionary. (Links added 5.09.04.)

  9. Cihui Tong (詞彙通)
    Various online unidirectional English/Chinese dictionaries/glossaries from Red Candle English website, intended for Chinese learners of English. (Link added 05.31.01 thanks to Charles Hammond) (GB)

  10. CJKV-English Dictionary
    A. Charles Muller's online, XML-formatted, UTF8-encoded, searchable database of CJK characters and compounds related to East Asian cultural, political, and intellectual history. The database is searchable via: Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Hangul, Korean MC, McCune-Reischauer, Katakana, and Japanese Romanization. (Link updated 04.01.09)

  11. Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants (異體字字典)
    Website maintained by the Mandarin Promotion Council, Ministry of Education, R.O.C. Variants of characters and radicals (bushou) and scanned images from early dictionary sources (Shuowen Jiezi, Guangyun, Jiyun, etc.), definitions, pronunciation (in Zhuyin Fuhao), Chinese dialect characters (and info on Chinese dialect dictionaries), etc. Search by radical-plus-stroke count or total-stroke count. (Link added 03.31.01 thanks to Thomas Chan) (Big5)

  12. Dictionary of Chinese Characters (CCDict)
    Thomas Chin's online, searchable dictionary for character readings of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka (Kejia) for 53,000+ Chinese characters, and for character meanings for 21,000+ characters. (Dialect-specific characters can be found using radical/stroke or English lookup.) Multiple search methods include Mandarin (Hanyu) Pinyin, Cantonese, Hakka, English, four-corner, bushou (radicals), Sino-Japanese, and Sino-Korean. (No decoder needed.) Also available is a Database Download page. (Link added 09.01.99)

  13. DictionaryHK.
    Online dictionary for translating from English to English, English to Chinese (Traditional or Simplified), and English to Japanese. (Added 05.03.04.)

  14. English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary (Chinese version)
    Sunrain.net's online searchable dictionary of characters, words, idioms, etc., with input in English, Pinyin, GB, or Big5, and output in English and GB/Big5/graphics. (Output with Pinyin romanization does not include indication of tone.) (Link added 10.06.00 thanks to Charles Hammond) (Big5)

  15. English-Chinese Online Dictionary
    H. Xin's online, searchable dictionary with output in GB, Big5, Image, or FT image. (Link added 09.01.99)

  16. English-Chinese LDS Terms
    Erik Peterson's online searchable dictionary of Latter Day Saints terms.

  17. Guoyu Cidian (國語詞典)
    Online, searchable, Chinese-Chinese dictionary from the Taiwan government. (Link added 12.16.97, thanks to tip from Richard Cook) (Big5)

  18. Jinshan Ciba (金山詞霸) ((Re)moved?).
    Kingsoft's website has an online, searchable, version of their Jinshan Ciba (PowerWord) Chinese-English, English- Chinese, and Chinese-Chinese dictionary for Windows, with general and specialized vocabulary (for law, chemistry, medicine, agriculture, architecture, etc., etc.). (See the description of their Jinshan Ciba 2002.) (Link added 11.12.00 thanks to Huey Hannah Lin, updated from URL for Jinshan Ciba 2000 to that for Jinshan Ciba 2002, which supports Windows XP) (GB)

  19. Lexiconer Online English-Chinese and Chinese-English Dictionaries (GB/Big5).
    Online searchable English-Chinese (GB/Big5) and Chinese-English character dictionary. (Link added 05.03.04.)

  20. Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (CUHK).
    Search in English, Pinyin, or by radical and stroke count, etc. Includes compounds, phrases, and idioms related to the word searched, as well as words and phrases containing a given Chinese character *anywhere* in the compound, phrase, or idiom; audio files for pronunciation of individual Chinese characters. Also linked to other databases, including Unihan, with info on encoding, other dialect pronunciations (e.g., Cantonese in Yale romanization), etc. (Link added 10.06.00 thanks to Charles Hammond.) (Big5)

  21. The Lingua Sinica Chinese-English Dictionary.
    Built and maintained by Benjamin Ao, this online, searchable Chinese-English dictionary -- with over 70,000 entries -- is the largest of its kind in the world. Furthermore, this online dictionary has many unique features that make it particularly useful for pedagogical purposes. (Link added 04.07.04)

  22. Hanno Lecher's Links to Online Chinese Dictionaries.
    Annotated links to dictionaries (Chinese only or Chinese included) that is part of HL's China WWW VL - Internet Guide for China Studies: Language. (Link added 08.11.98, updated 12.19.98.)

  23. IFCSS's Listing of Online Dictionaries/Glossaries
    (IFCSS had required username and password earlier; that's no longer the case, but this URL seems to have disappeared (for now?) Update 12.26.00.)
    (The list below includes some now-defunct sites and are so noted.):
    1. English-Chinese Information Technology (IT) Glossary
      Online glossary arranged in alphanumeric order with output in Big5 or GB from Koh Chit Tng (高極登). Last updated in Nov/95 and is archived by the Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society (COLIPS). (Link added 9.24.97; now defunct? 6.09.00)

    2. OK88 English-Chinese Dictionary
      Search online provided by OK88 Bilingual Internet Services. Type in an English word. Output in both big5 and readable image format. (Link added 9.24.97)

  24. KanjiBase on the Web
    This is Christian Wittern's online, searchable database, the "Largest Chinese Character Dictionary on the Web" with almost 50,000 characters. Search using Pinyin, four-corner, radical number in the Kangxi system, or total stroke count. (Link added 10.09.97, thanks to Jim Breen.)

  25. Pristine Lexicon.
    Quote from website: "free Chinese-English-Pinyin reference service [containing] over 120,000 entries ... from Chinese-English dictionaries in the public domain and specialized glossaries and industry-specific dictionaries developed in-house by Pristine Communications..." (Link added 10.02.99, thanks to Don Klein.)

  26. Putonghua Dongci Cidian (普通話動詞詞典).
    Search in Chinese (GB-encoding) for verbs in standard Chinese in the online, Putonghua verb dictionary Linguistic Institute, Shanghai Normal University. (Other electronic dictionaries that are part of their dictionaries database are not yet online.) (Link added 03.12.01.) (GB)

  27. Resources for the Study of East Asian Language and Thought
    A. Charles Muller's website, with a wealth of resources, including a WWW CJK-English Dictionary Database, and a Dictionary of East Asian (CJK) Buddhist Terms.

  28. Yuwen Congshu (語文叢書)
    A collection of resources, including online Chinese dictionary, handbook of punctuation marks, classifiers handbook, word list for Taiwanese, etc. (Big5) (Link added 1.16.98, thanks to Rick Harbaugh.)

  29. Unihan Database
    On-line, searchable database maintained by John Jenkins that is part of the Unicode Home Page. Database contains image maps for the "unified Han" set of logographic characters for Chinese (including dialect characters), Japanese, Korean and historical Vietnamese; comparative encoding info on various schemes (i.e., mapping to major standards (GB 2312, GB 12345, CNS 11643, CCCII, Big5, JIS X 0208, JIS X 0212, KS C 5601, KS C 5657) and other mappings (PRC Telegraph, ROC Telegraph, EACC, Xerox), dictionary definitions, and indices to authoritative dictionaries (Kangxi, Morohashi, Dae Jaweon, Hanyu Da Zidian, Nelson, Matthews, Karlgren, Fenn, Cowles, Meyer-Wempe). (Link imported on 10.23.99 (and updated 09.12.02) from links and info in my ChinaLinks 3 on Unicode and Chinese Character Sets and Internal Codes. For a freely-downloadable copy of the database as a text file from Unicode's official FTP site, see Unihan Database: Unicode FTP Site above.)

  30. Zhongwen Zipu
    Rick Harbaugh's Chinese Character Genealogy: Chinese characters searchable by Pinyin, etc.; etymology and glosses in English, pronunciations in Pinyin. (no decoder needed) (See also RH's Chinese Characters Dictionary Web, listed above.)

  31. Zai Xian Han Dian (在线汉典. ZDic.NET).
    Search in Chinese or by either Pinyin or radical-stroke count. (Link added 02.19.06)

Top 3. JAPANESE WORD LISTS/DICTIONARIES ON THE WEB

Note: All Web-accessible Japanese dictionaries (on- and off-line) that I've come across seem to use Jim Breen's Edict, Kanjidic, or XJDIC as the base.

  1. Edict
    Jim Breen's English<->Japanese dictionary (actually a wordlist), and his KanjiDic (database of info on kanji). See also Jim Breen's Japanese Page, where he lists his projects, the latest being Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server and the newest project, the JMDict Project (added 8.7.00). (see further info in section 4). (Edict and related links updated on 08.07.00.)

  2. JJDict
    Jack Palevich's Java-Based Japanese-English dictionary (No longer online. 09.01.99)

  3. MacJDic
    Dan Crevier's Japanese<->English dictionary (Link updated 09.01.99)

Top 4. JAPANESE ONLINE DICTIONARIES

  1. Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server (Mirror sites, incl. at U. of Virginia | Centre for Communications Research, Canada).
    Developed by Jim Breen to enable direct WWW access to the dictionary files he had compiled, and to provide some of the functionality on the WWW of the various dictionary search engines associated with him. (Original link added 10.07.97; updated 08.07.00; mirror sites add 09.18.00.)

  2. Japanese-English Dictionary Portal: for Japanese language web resources. Website states that it "provides easy look-ups of entries in Jim Breen's Japanese-English dictionary, WWWJDIC. By highlighting characters, words, or phrases on a Web page in Kanji/Kana, Romaji, or English, and then clicking on the JEDP menu, you can automatically find those characters or words in the dictionary. From this departure point you can enter the University of Virginia's Japanese Text Initiative resources or begin to browse any Japanese language web document or website." (Link added 09.18.00)

  3. Jeffrey Friedl's Japanese<->English Online Dictionary     (Mirror Site A | Mirror Site B)
    Website includes links to other online resources are also included. (Link updated and mirror sites added 09.01.99)

  4. JavaDict.
    Todd Rudick's Japanese/English dictionary and character dictionary browser featuring handwriting recognition-based character lookup. (Link added 9.01.99)

  5. Kitamakura's Online Glossary Index.
    Links to Japanese and English glossaries. (Link added 09.01.99)

  6. Rafael Santos' Online Dictionaries (No longer available. Moved?)
    English-Japanese, Japanese-English and Kanji dictionaries based on Jim Breen's Edict; at R.S.'s Japanese Language Information website. (No longer available. Moved? 9.01.99)

  7. Vesa Karhu's Finnish - Japanese - Finnish On-line Dictionary
    Searchable in Finnish or (EUC-encoded) Japanese. (Link removed. 09.01.99)

Top 5. INTERNAL CODES FOR CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND KOREAN (CJK)

  1. Unicode and Chinese Character Sets and Internal Codes. Links that are part of my ChinaLinks website; includes links to the Unicode homepage and their Unihan Database for CJK, character sets for Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.), as well as links to information and charts and tables for Chinese (and J/K) character sets: GB (GB 2312), GBK (GB 13000), GB 18030, Big5, Big5 Plus, etc.

  2. CJKV Character Set Server.
    Ken Lunde's website for generating code charts for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (thanks to Thomas Chan). Also visit Ken Lund's webpage for links to CJK-Related Resources (thanks to Jun Da).

  3. CJK Character Tables
    Koichi Yasuoka's website for CJK codes (and more).

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[1] The original name of the project was actually "Chinese Netnews Online Reading Assistant," but it was shortened to "Chinese Online Reading Assistant" (CORA) on 26 October 1996 to reflect a broader scope of topics and sources.
visitors since 8 November 1997. (There were 246 visitors between 10/14/96 and 11/8/97.)

To cite this page:
Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: Word Lists and Online Glossaries/Dictionaries
<http://ChinaLinks.osu.edu/cdict.htm> [Accessed <DATE>]

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Created 6 October 1996, with conversion to UTF-8 on 11.30.01, and moving of the page to my ChinaLinks site on 05.15.04.
Last update: 1 April 2009.
Copyright © 1996-201x Marjorie K.M. Chan, Ohio State University. All rights reserved.

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