Chinese - English dictionary

How to search

Enter your Chinese, English or Pinyin text into the search box above.

New! You no longer need to choose a language, it is automatically detected. You can also search in Traditional Chinese (although, only simplified Chinese characters are returned). Click an entry's "Full entry" link to see both the simplified and traditional characters.

For Pinyin searches, you can search with or without tone numbers e.g. "ni3 hao3" or "ni hao". Separate Pinyin syllables with a space.

Match types

The "Match type" options work as follows:

• Exact - only returns words exactly matching your search term, e.g. search for "red" in English, will only return entries with the English word "red"
• Anywhere in result - returns words which contain your search term anywhere, e.g. searching for "red" will find "hundred", "red" and "red envelope"
• Start and end of result - returns words where your search term appears at the start or end of the words respectively.

View options

Normally, if you have a suitable Chinese font on your computer, using the "text" option will result in the fastest page loading times. However, if you don't have a unicode Chinese font installed, or you want to see different font styles, the dictionary can load the results as images instead.

The three font styles are as follows:

Heiti

Songti

Kaiti

To further speed up the display of images, if you are not using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can choose the "Inline data" option. This option embeds the images into the page code, meaning your browser does not need to download them separately. Unfortunately, IE does not support inline data.