What etymology dictionaries are available?

Question

What dictionaries (online, software-based or in paper form) explain the origins of a word and its evolution over time? E.g. how the character was once written, how the usage – and the meaning – changed over time.

Answer 1

zhongwen.com has a very limited amount of information on each character's origin.

Answer 2

Wen Lin is an amazing piece of software that has all of the etymological features you are looking for. The central downside is that it is a bit pricey. Most universities have a copy, though, and there may be the opportunity to get some kind of student pricing discount. (Not sure if that applies to your case.)

Answer 3

I found the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese to be a great source if you're interested in the evolution of the prounciation and meaning of Chinese words. It avoids etymology of character structure though; for that, I would suggest chineseetymology.org.

Answer 4

There's a list of etymology resources (including a couple already mentioned) on this page: http://mandarinportal.com/etymology.php

Answer 5

In this post I gave an overview of online resources:

On http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en you can see how a character evolved, the simplified and traditional characters.

Another similar website is http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx .

Zdict is completely in Chinese: http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE7Zdic9BZdicAE.htm

Here is another website in Chinese (that only supports transitional characters): http://alphads10-2.hkbu.edu.hk/~lcprichi/

As Aristide mentioned http://www.yellowbridge.com has similar functionality.

Although it doesn't show how the characters evolved, I also like http://zhongwen.com It explains how characters are composed out of other characters.

Answer 6

This is an excellent one (and it's free too ;) )

Yellow Bridge