Chinese Dictionary Guide: From Beginner to Advanced Resources

Dictionaries are some of the most useful tools in your arsenal as a learner of any language, serving as comprehensive databases of not just a word and its definition, but often much more information from grammar to usage to example sentences. Even if you merely plan to dabble in a language, dictionaries can be essential because translators ultimately need to guess the context and are prone to error.

Let's explore what makes a good Chinese dictionary and some of the best offerings for English speakers.

Dictionary Overview

Other Dictionary-like Resources

What's in a Good Chinese Dictionary?

As a learner of Mandarin Chinese, there are some key pieces of information that we want to get out of our dictionaries.

Core Essentials:

Greatly Desired:

Bonus Info:

No one dictionary has everything, but the more of these points, the better. Furthermore, the more terms, the better. A dictionary with a few thousand entries is of very limited value, whereas one with a hundred thousand entries will be far more likely to have what you are looking for.

And last but not least, a good dictionary is ELECTRONIC! While it's cool to have big ol' physical dictionary lying around, it's incredibly inefficient and often cumbersome to actually look up words in it. The best dictionaries are instantly searchable.

Dictionary Types

Bilingual 　中文 ➜ Your Language

Bilingual dictionaries are dictionaries that offer a native language definition or explanation of the target language term. These are the bread and butter of beginner learners since you won't be able to read definitions in Chinese.

Under the umbrella of bilingual dictionaries, we have those where you search a Chinese character or word and return a native language entry, and those that involve searching an English term, and returning the Chinese translation—and potentially an entry and example. As a beginner in a language, you will be mostly be focused on trying to understand it, so you will mainly be searching a Chinese term.

Monolingual 　中文 ➜ 中文

When we use the term monolingual dictionaries, we are referring to dictionaries where the search term is the same as that of the entry language. Thus, these are dictionaries that native speakers of a language use to understand unknown terms. These are better for more advanced learners.

Monolingual dictionaries vary in how useful they are depending on the kind of term that you're looking up. If it's a simple noun, then a translation is very clear. Imagine looking up "dog" in another language. In a monolingual dictionary it will give you a general explanation of the kind of animals that dogs are, which can be rather vague. On the other hand, a one word translation "dog" would be very clear and quick to digest.

Character Dictionaries

A character dictionary is what it sounds like: it is dictionary of isolated characters as opposed to words that may consist of two or more characters. These kinds of dictionaries are situationally useful. If you want characters specific information such as etymology (historical origin), variant character forms, radicals, and more.

Generally as a learner, you will be focused on the word level, which makes the other kinds of dictionaries more useful throughout your language learning journey. These may be situationally useful, especially for those learning to write or who enjoy being able to better breakdown a character.

Mobile Chinese Dictionaries

Pleco

Availability: iOS, Android
Links: Website, iOS, Android

This should be your one-stop shop when it comes to a mobile dictionary experience. Pleco is a dictionary aggregator application with a whole suite of features and dictionaries. Let's explore the core feature set.

Dictionaries

Pleco has many both free and purchasable dictionaries. Even with free dictionary options you will have access to not only a large coverage of terms, but searching will combine the entries of your installed dictionaries, making searching even more efficient. You also have access to specialized terminology dictionaries and monolingual dictionaries.

Other Features

Wiktionary

Availability: Web, iOS, Android
Links: Website

Wiktionary is a very comprehensive free Chinese dictionary which you can access on mobile via a browser, or via the following applications. Wiktionary is covered in more depth in the bilingual dictionary section.

Unofficial Wiktionary Apps:

Bilingual Web Dictionaries

yellowbridge

Availability: Web
Website: yellowbridge.com

While this website looks a little dated, it's not the looks that count. This dictionary is highly functional and ticks a ton of the boxes that we have mentioned.

Search Options

Character/Word Info

Other

Wiktionary

Availability: Web, iOS, Android
Website: English, Chinese

Wiktionary is a free dictionary that offers comprehensive information in one page. It is a very powerful resource and has both English and monolingual Chinese pages.

Search Options

Character/Word Info

Other

Monolingual Web Dictionaries

Mengdian - 萌典

Availability: Web, iOS, Android
Links: About, Website, iOS, Android

This dictionary is compiled from open sources by "g0v" (gov-zero), a decentralized civic tech community founded in Taiwan. It has a streamlined look and rich entries, but less search options as compared to others. While it is primarily a monolingual dictionary, it does have entries in English, French, and German at the bottom. If you want English, it is better so use other dictionaries.

Search Options

Character/Word Info

Other:

Taiwan Ministry of Education - 教育部

Availability: Web
Links: Website (English), Website (Chinese)

This dictionary is released by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and has a rather streamlined look, gives you concise definitions, and has some useful bonuses.

Search Options

Character/Word Info

Baidu - 百度

Availability: Web
Links: Website

This is a dictionary from the company Baidu, which is one of the largest multinational technology companies in the world, based in China. It has broad coverage of many terms and has info from the Baidu Encyclopedia.

Search Options

Character/Word Info

Pop-up Dictionaries

Zhongzhong: An improved Chinese Dictionary

Availability: Chrome
Links: Github, Extension

This is the best free pop-up dictionary available for Mandarin Chinese learners, but it is only available on Chrome. It has extensive customization options.

You can set the dictionary to work on words or to only give character info.

You can have it show simplified, traditional or both.

There are also the following display options:

There is a read aloud feature for Mainland China and Taiwan accents:

You can also customize the look of the window itself.

There are also many keyboard shortcuts available for a variety of functions including navigating words, copying words, adding them to an internal word list, and looking words up in an online dictionary.

Zhongwen: Chinese-English Dictionary

Availability: Chrome, Firefox
Links: Github, Chrome, Firefox

This is a very similar pop-up dictionary to Zhongzhong that has slightly fewer options, but is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

You have similar options but less granularity when choosing how to display the pop-up window. There is no read aloud feature and there are no extensive hotkey options like in Zhongzhong.

Migaku

Availability: Chrome
Links: Website, Extension (Standard), Extension (Early Access)

Migaku offers a different pop-up dictionary experience that is integrated with our software suite. Migaku is a language learning platform that parses Chinese into words, tracks your known words, and other functionality integrated across web, iOS, and Android.

The Migaku pop-up dictionary is enabled on parsed text, such that when you click on a word you can instantly see a definition and frequency information. Similar to Pleco, the pop-up combines the entries of dictionaries that you have installed. While the above pop-up dictionaries allow you to do lookups on text based websites, Migaku additionally integrates with Netflix, YouTube, and more such that you can perform looks up on subtitles easily. From there you can create flashcards for a given sentence, with audio, definitions, and more.

Netflix:

There are several dictionaries available, and so long as you have a dictionary in the right format, you can use it with Migaku.

On top of that, there are numerous tabs that add additional information. These include, word audio, image, example sentences, ChatGPT explanation, sentence translation, and external dictionary links.

Other Dictionary-like Resources

While these don't fall under the traditional dictionary, they are very useful resources. The first two we will be looking at you can think of us "context" dictionaries. They help you find example sentences so that you can see the context that certain words are used in, as well as their translation. These are more useful, the more advanced you get in a language.

Reverso Context

Availability: Web, iOS, Android, Desktop App
Links: Website, iOS, Android

This is the best all-around "context dictionary." It is compiled from subtitles, and has a broad coverage of terms. It's also useful for finding colloquial terms, since they often show up in subtitles.

Linguee

Availability: Web, iOS, Android* (only older versions; not updated since 2017)
Links: Website, iOS, Android

This complements Reverso Context well, since it is a database of more formal translations. There are a lot of government documents and other professional translations that are searchable here. This site also provides definitions on some entries. Unfortunately the English search doesn't seem to work to well for English-Chinese, but searching Chinese works just fine.

Results for query of "条款":

Other

The Chinese Grammar Wiki catalogs common Mandarin Chinese grammar points. Unfortunately, it only offers examples in simplified Chinese characters. Other than that, it's a nice place to browse since it has everything cataloged by difficulty on both a CEFR scale (A2, B1, etc.) and an HSK scale.

The Collins dictionary can help you find reliable Chinese translations of terms. It is a dictionary, but we wouldn't recommend you use it as such, since it's much more oriented towards searching in English for a Chinese equivalent. It is very useful when used in this way, if you want to learn how to say a specific term, or need to compose Chinese for a class.

And that wraps up the key dictionary resources for Mandarin Chinese. If you're looking for a comprehensive approach for learning Chinese from the basics all the way to fluency, we recommend you check out our Mandarin courses and software. Our courses have simple progression of grammar points with native audio, that is integrated with our software, dictionaries, and other functionality, which is cross-platform. You can start your free trial today!