Chinese Dictionaries

Chinese—English and English—Chinese

CJKV-English Dictionary
The CJKV-English Dictionary is perhaps the most comprehensive English language dictionary of East Asian literary terms, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese characters and compounds, related to East Asian cultural, political, and intellectual history. It is edited by Charles Muller, a Professor in the humanities at Toyo Gakuen University in Chiba, Japan. Students may, under the Limited Use agreement, access the dictionary by entering "guest" as the username with no password, which will allow a total of 5 searches in a 24-hour period.

Digital Dictionary of Buddhism
The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Charles Muller (see above entry), is perhaps the best on-line resource for English translations of Buddhist terms in Sanskrit, Chinese, Pali and Tibet. The user is able to conduct general searches using characters or by various East Asian Romanization systems, and to search lists organized by terms, texts, persons, temples, schools and places.

A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms
A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms by William Edward Soothill and Lewis Hodous was first published in the early 1930s. The text has been digitized by Charles Muller and may be viewed or downloaded as a single HTML file or viewed with entries hyperlinked to the CJKV-English Dictionary. Users of Pleco Software for Palm and Pocket PC may also download a PlecoDict database version of the dictionary here.

Taoist Culture and Information Centre Glossaries
The Taoist Culture and Information Centre maintains a Chinese-English Glossary and English-Chinese Glossary of Daoist terms. When using the Chinese-English Glossary, click Pinyin (拼音) to list all entries alphabetically.

CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary
This Chinese-English Dictionary is hosted on Mandarin Tools and provides a searchable interface for the CEDICT dictionary originated by Paul Denisowksi. You can search by Chinese (using GB, Big5 or Unicode encodings), pinyin, or English. Results will show the Chinese word, the pinyin transliteration and English definition. Users can also click on the pinyin to hear its pronounciation in Mandarin.

Zhongwen Zipu Chinese-English Dictionary
The Zhongwen Zipu is a unique Chinese-English character dictionary developed by Rick Harbaugh and based on the Shuowen jiezi, an etymological dictionary compiled by Xu Shen over 2,000 years ago. The Zhongwen Zipu charts graphically organize over 4,000 characters according to their genealogy from less than 200 root characters (wen), basic components of Chinese characters that differ from the more familiar 214 "radicals" (bushou). This dictionary, aso available in a print edition, Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, is particularly helpful for students to quickly locate and better remember the relations between Chinese characters.

Chinese—Chinese

Guoyu Cidian
the Guoyu Cidian (國語辭典) is perhaps the best Chinese-Chinese dictionary freely available on-line and is valuable for its many historical usage examples. The dictionary is published by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education and requires Big 5 character encoding.

Back to Online Resources