About & sources | Dengdeng Dictionary

Look up a word for its English meaning, pinyin, and traditional form. Some entries also include example sentences and notes that help you choose the right sense.

We built this to make it easier to compare words and understand how they’re used. From an entry, you can look up its individual characters, open words with related meanings, wander the word galaxy, or read an example sentence. You can also practice HSK word lists with free, shareable flashcard quizzes — no signup needed.

Search covers all 119,383 headwords in our CC-CEDICT snapshot, including their traditional forms and different readings. Common words get a small preference when results are otherwise close. A more precise match still comes first, and rare or historical words remain searchable.

The browse index is a smaller selection of 2,952 headwords arranged by pinyin. It doesn’t limit search. You can also browse the most common 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 words, study the HSK word lists, or see words with examples. For reading beyond definitions, our guides explain Chinese internet slang, classic idioms (chengyu), and concepts like mianzi and guanxi.

Sources & licenses

Dictionary definitions

Definitions come from CC-CEDICT, published by MDBG and the CC-CEDICT contributors. This edition uses the snapshot dated 2024-05-14. Its original file declares Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

We group entries by simplified headword, convert numbered pinyin to tone marks, and select a subset for the browse index. The adapted dictionary content remains available under CC BY-SA 4.0. No endorsement by MDBG or the contributors is implied.

Word frequency

Frequency ranks come from SUBTLEX-CH by Qing Cai and Marc Brysbaert (2010), based on 33.5 million words in Chinese film and television subtitles. The published dataset is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

We rank words by their occurrence count in that corpus; equal counts share a rank. A lower number means a more common word in these subtitles, not in every kind of Chinese writing. We match simplified spellings exactly, share the rank across a word’s readings, and leave words without a match unranked. Frequency gives close search results a small boost; a clearly better text match still comes first.

Download the derived ranks · Source and methodology

HSK word lists

Word pages label each entry with its band in the current HSK standard (国际中文教育中文水平等级标准, GF 0025-2021) and, when it differs, its level in the old six-level HSK. Browse the HSK word lists or read how the versions differ.

Band assignments come from the community-maintained HSK 3.0 word list and level assignments from the HSK 2.0 vocabulary lists, both MIT-licensed. We match simplified spellings exactly and keep a word’s lowest band or level when a list repeats it; list spellings outside the dictionary stay unlisted. Source and checksums · Download the derived assignments.

Character drawing

Stroke animation and tracing use Hanzi Writer under the MIT License. The unmodified character files come from Hanzi Writer Data, derived from Make Me a Hanzi and Arphic fonts, under the Arphic Public License. Copyright © 1999 Arphic Technology Co., Ltd.; Make Me a Hanzi copyright © 2016 Shaunak Kishore.

The drawings follow mainland China stroke order, including traditional characters; regional conventions can differ. Some rare characters are unavailable. Pinned source and character coverage.

Examples and usage notes

Examples credited to Tatoeba include contributor and source links. Their text uses CC BY 2.0 FR, except where a separate license is shown. Simplified-script, translation, and pinyin adaptations are noted with each example.

Other examples and usage notes are Dengdeng additions to the dictionary.

These contributions are offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. Download the original example content · Download additional examples and source credits.

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