Chinese Dictionary (Traditional Characters)

Chinese Character Lookup Made Easy

Chinese character lookup can be a pain in the butt. This dictionary makes it easy. And you don't have to know the characters' pronunciation!

Each character entry in this dictionary includes the characters meaning in English, its Mandarin pronunciation in Pinyin, it's radical, stroke count  plus its cangjie input code.

Cangjie input codes make it easy to "touch-type" Traditional Chinese characters.

(While there are Cangjie input codes for Simplified Chinese characters, this dictionary only includes them for Traditional characters.)

An Easy Lookup System

At the heart of this Chinese Dictionary is the Easy Lookup System. 

If you see a character, say on a sign or in a menu, or in a picture or a book and want to look up its meaning, the first step is to figure out which of the 12 easy lookup categories it belongs to. 

How is that easy? 

• You don’t need to know the characters pronunciation. 
  
• Nor do you need to figure out its radical.
  

All you need to do is figure out which one of 12 basic shapes it’s categorized under.

As an example, does your target character begin with a box shape 囗 like in 單 or an upside down u shape 凵 as in 幽?

 Does it start with a horizontal line 一 such as 雨, a vertical line 丨such as 歳, a cross shape 十 as in 南 or a hat shape 八 as in 分? 

Perhaps it begins with one of the three asymmetrical shapes: a slash 丿as in 氣, a dot 丶 as in 成 or a hook 𠄌 as in 給.

Within each category, there are up to 16 groups, all related in some way by the category shape. And so, once you’ve figured out the category, you then refine the search.

As an example, the Box category has 16 groups, all of which are variations of the box shape:

口吅号足巳尸囗田日門艮眉黑罒目貝

The horizontal 一 category also has 16 groups:

一歹石丆下不丁工王干兩雨西覃亞耳

Note how they each begin with a horizontal line.

Once you've found the group, you can then look for your character in the list of characters within that group. 

Save Time Looking Up Chinese Characters

Here's what one person had to say about using Easy Lookup:

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Founder, CEO at Pizza Rock Taiwan

Dictionary Entries

So once you've found your target character, what then?

Each dictionary entry includes:

• character Radical, 
  
• Stroke count 

and the important stuff like

• It's Meaning and 
  
• Pronunciation
  
• Cangjie input code

And it includes words (words are two or more characters grouped together) that include that character.

The simplified form of the Chinese character, if different from the traditional form, is also included in each entry.

Note that the Cangjie input code allows you to type the traditional character based on its shape. 

Navigation

The dictionary is designed so that it is easy to navigate between related characters and words (and between entries and indexes). 

• From any word, you can navigate to the entry for any character within that word. 
  
• From any character, you can navigate to any word that contains that character, whether it is the first character in the word or the last or somewhere in the middle.
• You can also navigate easily between characters that have the same first element or the same last element.

Cangjie Codes (for Over 7000 Traditional Characters)

The dictionary contains over 7000 character entries. It has been designed to not only make looking up Chinese characters easier, it has also been designed to help make inputting Chinese characters easy too. 

You can always use pinyin input to type Chinese characters, but using cangjie codes you can actually learn to touch type Chinese characters. And so that cangjie codes are made easier to learn, the index also includes the cangjie code for each character.

Note that entries contain cangjie code symbols and letter codes while the index only includes the letter codes. 

You can Keep Your Paper Dictionaries

This dictionary can also be a useful tool if you have Paper-based dictionaries that you still use. The dictionary makes it easy to look up characters, find their radical and stroke count so that you can then find the character easier in your paper-based dictionary.

PDF

The dictionary is in PDF form and is formatted for optimal use with desktop, laptop or tablet type devices. 

Since the file size is large (26 mb), using Adobe acrobat is recommended for faster loading times. 

Note that there are two pdf files. One is in portrait mode and the other in landscape mode.

For more on the Easy Lookup system and Chinese characters in general, please visit the  Learning Chinese Symbols Made Easy website.