13
votes
Accepted
How are Chinese-Chinese word dictionaries meant to be navigated?
Lexicography is a well-established tradition in the West because 'words' have always been the most recognible meaningful units in Indo-european languages so linguistic efforts have always gone into ...
12
votes
Accepted
How do I look up a graph in 說文通訓定聲?
How to look up an entry in 《說文通訓定聲》?
前言 Introduction
一般中文字典的內容是按部首字形分類排列。
《說文通訓定聲》則是依音韻分類排列。
從內容順序來看,作者 朱駿聲 是假設讀者已熟悉字的音韻。
所以,他先列出自創的「古韻十八部」做為「總目」,然後才是各部的內容。
The contents of common Chinese ...
10
votes
Accepted
What does the notation 【方】 mean in a Chinese dictionary?
【方】
Is short for 方言.
方言 is defined by mdbg as:
topolect / dialect
Why saggy is considered topolectical or dialectical, though, is beyond me.

Mou某♦
- 35.7k
8
votes
Chinese etymology dictionary for words of more than one character
It is true that you need different dictionaries for older and newer words. For newer words, 近現代漢語辭源 published by 上海辞书出版社 in 2019 is quite comprehensive as far as I know. I believe it is a revised and ...
6
votes
Accepted
Are radicals a relatively new invention for looking up dictionaries?
I believe that Chinese characters are born with radicals, but they were not classified by radicals until Shuowen Jiezi.
To understand why radicals appeared at that time, we need to know that in the ...
6
votes
Are radicals a relatively new invention for looking up dictionaries?
I think your phrasing may be ambiguous, so I'll answer in two ways. If you're asking if characters didn't have a radical and then one was added - thereby changing the character - for classification ...
6
votes
Chinese etymology dictionary for words of more than one character
Finding out etymologies of words is a complex process, and frequently correct information is impossible to obtain anywhere, even if it would be actually known. I will describe my general outline of ...
6
votes
Are there any datasets or spreadsheets that contain the most popular Chinese characters and their components?
Make me a Hanzi
This database dictionary.txt gives the decompositions of characters into components:
{"character":"侈","definition":"luxurious, extravagant",&...
5
votes
Is there an official stroke order for each character?
There isn't an official stroke order for each character, but only a subset of all characters used, and official stroke order exists solely for the purpose of educating schoolchildren.
Japanese stroke ...
5
votes
Accepted
How do I resolve dictionary ambiguities when looking up words/phrases?
One way I use to "resolve" those ambiguities in a pinch is by using two dictionaries - one English to Chinese and another Chinese to English.
Essentially, when looking for a Chinese word ...
5
votes
Accepted
5
votes
Are there any datasets or spreadsheets that contain the most popular Chinese characters and their components?
I created a Chrome extension that can track how frequent the word/character is used based on the Chinese websites you frequently read or visited
If you need to access the database, press F12 and then ...
4
votes
Accepted
What do the character components in 旅 and 派 represent?
though part of the right component of the character "旅" & "派" look similar, they've different origin.
旅 (u+65c5) is a character since oracle bone script, that it's composed by 㫃 (u+3ac3), plus 2 ...
4
votes
Is there a Chinese WordNet?
For the Simplified Chinese script, there is Chinese Open Wordnet which you can search online.
This is part of Open Multilingual Wordnet, which also links to a smaller project called Chinese WordNet ...
4
votes
What does // mean in Pleco's description of pronunciation?
//
Is pinyin notation for separable verbs and usually more specifically: verb-object phrases.
This is not just Pleco notation. Here's an except from the editorial notes of《四川方言词典》:
And the ...

Mou某♦
- 35.7k
4
votes
Accepted
Is there an Android app that pressing on words translates them?
I found the Pleco app manages to do this task using the (free) option Screen Reader:
For example, browsing online in a website:
If we press on the button
, the app recognizes the characters and ...
4
votes
What is the Mandarin PinYin pronunciation for the Bushou that cannot be typed?
FYI, you're overemphasising the importance of this.
Firstly, the de facto international Chinese character radical indexing standard is the Kangxi system for orthodox characters, which is what Unicode ...
4
votes
How are Chinese-Chinese word dictionaries meant to be navigated?
Intralingual dictionaries will have some level of circular definition, that's just inevitable. But to be fair, I'm not surprised if there's a lack of high quality Chinese dictionaries. In this ...
3
votes
What do the character components in 旅 and 派 represent?
As mentioned elsewhere, the bottom right of 「旅」 and 「派」 are unrelated.
The left and top right of 「旅」 was indeed a single component 「㫃」, and the rest of the character was「从」. 「㫃」 is a picture of a ...
3
votes
Accepted
Chengyu dictionary
Swooping in eight years later, but I recently developed a free chengyu website that does almost everything you're looking for — and more. It's called the Laowai's Unofficial Chengyu Guide, and it ...
3
votes
Dictionary for Vietnamese to Chinese characters
http://hvdic.thivien.net/
Just type in google Hán Việt từ điển and a lot will come up. The above is the best though because it also tells you the usage of the word in literature and in compounded ...
3
votes
Accepted
Is there an Old Chinese dictionary which shows clearly the usage of a word?
古漢語既常以單字爲詞,容個人推薦 《王力古漢語字典》。
我也很贊成@水巷孑蠻的建議,應該用繁體讀古文。不但有簡繁轉換一對多的一個問題,古文裏假借與通假字甚多,分析古文的時侯字與詞的聲、調、韻等十分重要。簡體新造字用的聲部多數都不符合古漢語的聲韻。
例:《王力古漢語字典》「語」字詞條:
3
votes
How do I resolve dictionary ambiguities when looking up words/phrases?
The fastest way to resolve such ambiguities is to shed thinking in English. Right now, you're looking up an English word and finding a whole bunch of synonyms used in different contexts for it in ...
3
votes
Accepted
Are the wiktionary definitions for 切 qiè correct?
From CantoDict Dictionary:
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/793/
(jyutping) cit3, (pinyin) qie1
[1] cut; slice; chop; mince; carve
[2] (indicates that the ...
3
votes
Accepted
The Meaning of “~” in Definitions
The use of this swung dash means the entry character or word is used in the corresponding words.
2 旧时指读书人:~子。~民。学~。
... is equivalent to:
2 In olden times, refers to educated people. 士子。士民。学士。
...
3
votes
Accepted
What is the fundamental difference between 大同世界 and Utopias
Tl;dr: Terms that share apparently similar meanings but are each specific to their own culture should not be considered as synonymous.
The reason for incomparability is that the context or purpose of ...
3
votes
Where can I get a Chinese language word list?
For NLP, I guess you need Chinese word segmentation. A normal dictionary will probably not suffice. You need to look at specialized tools like https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba or https://github.com/...
3
votes
Criteria of making an acceptable word/character in Chinese
There is a yearly contest in Japan for creating new kanji. Last year, the winner was a new character for "social distancing"
A clever play on the character 座, meaning "to sit", ...
3
votes
Why has zuò//láo // in between?
The // is the marker used by Pleco to indicate that the word is in a special class of intransitive verbs called separable verbs.
Other references call these V.O. (Verb Object) constructions. ABC ...
3
votes
How are Chinese-Chinese word dictionaries meant to be navigated?
If the purpose is to understand the word from the perspective of an English speaker, I would say Wiktionary is a better option which gives you synonyms, definitions, examples, and pronunciation (plus ...
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