Chinese Character Dictionary

📖 About This Tool

Checking a pronunciation while helping with homework, counting strokes and checking the element before choosing a name, or wanting to know how a rare character in a classical text is put together: these tasks have one thing in common. You need one or two characters, and the answer is scattered across several references. This tool puts those fragments in one place and answers as you type.

It works plainly. Type the characters you want, a single one or a whole pasted sentence, and the tool pulls out every Chinese character, drops the duplicates and looks each one up. Press Enter or the lookup button and the entries appear. For each character you get pinyin with tone marks, the radical, stroke count, a structural decomposition, the five element attribute and the meaning, optionally with related idioms and homophones.

The decomposition uses ideographic description sequences, so a character like "bright" is shown as two components side by side. That makes the composition obvious at a glance and helps a great deal when teaching character recognition. The element is derived from the last digit of the stroke count in the way onomastics usually does it, so it can be used directly when weighing a name. Meanings currently cover common characters; rarer ones are marked as having no data yet and shown with related idioms instead, so you never get an empty result.

A short list of high frequency characters sits in the side panel for a quick trial. Results can be copied as plain text or exported as CSV. Everything runs locally: no network request, nothing uploaded.

The entry opens with the reading in Mandarin Pinyin, then the radical, which is the indexing key used by paper dictionaries and the fastest way to look up a character you cannot type. Stroke count follows, and for anyone learning to write it matters more than it sounds: characters are sorted and taught by stroke number, and two characters that look alike often differ by a single stroke. The Wuxing element and the structural decomposition are included because parents consult them when choosing a name, and the decomposition shows how the character is assembled from parts, which is how it is remembered rather than copied. Where a character carries more than one reading, both are listed with the common one first.

Homophone groups and idioms built from the character appear when the corresponding boxes are ticked, so one lookup can also feed a lesson or a name discussion. The library holds a couple of thousand common characters, which covers everyday reading, textbooks and newspapers; rare and historical forms are reported as not found rather than guessed at. Everything is computed locally, so nothing you type leaves the page.

✨ Features

• Batch lookup: enter many characters at once, de-duplicated automatically.
• Complete entry: pinyin, radical, stroke count, decomposition, element and meaning.
• Related idioms: common idioms containing the character, to show usage.
• Homophones: characters sharing the reading, useful for telling them apart.
• Statistics: input count, coverage, average strokes and the heaviest character.
• Two outputs: copy as plain text, or export CSV.

🚀 How to Use

1. Type the characters to look up; several at once is fine.
2. Tick what you want shown: meaning, idioms, homophones, element.
3. Press lookup or Enter and the entries appear below.
4. Use the common characters in the side panel for a quick trial.
5. Copy or export CSV when you need to keep the result.

⚠️ Notes

• Coverage: pinyin, radical, strokes and structure cover common characters; meanings focus on frequent ones.
• Element: derived from the stroke count as is customary in naming practice, a folk usage rather than a divination.
• Multiple readings: only the common reading is listed, so judge by context.
• Duplicates: a character repeated in the input is looked up once.
• Nothing is saved: refreshing clears the results, so export in time.