Chinese to Pinyin
How to Use
📖 Tool Introduction
Turn Chinese text into pinyin, in three forms: with tone marks, without them, or as the first letter of each syllable. A polyphone dictionary is built in.
The hard part of this conversion is not the characters, it is the ones with more than one reading. The same character means bank and reads one way in the word for a bank, and means a row and reads another way in a phrase counting rows. Weight reads one way when it is a verb about repeating and another when it is a noun about heaviness. A table that maps characters one by one gets these wrong every time, and that is precisely why the output of a simple converter cannot be trusted for anything you intend to read aloud or hand to someone else.
This tool resolves them by longest match. It looks for the longest phrase in the dictionary that starts at the current position, and if one is found its reading wins over the individual characters underneath it. Only when no phrase matches does it fall back to the single character reading. The phrase table holds entries whose reading differs from what the character table would give on its own, because those are the entries that change the answer; a phrase that agrees with its characters adds nothing but size.
The character table covers over twenty six thousand characters, spanning the main block and the extension, and it ships only the tone-marked form. The plain form is derived by stripping the marks rather than being stored separately, which keeps the two consistent and roughly halves what has to be loaded. In the plain form the letter with the diaeresis becomes a v, following the habit of Chinese input methods, so that it can be typed back in. The first letter mode takes one letter per syllable and is mostly used for abbreviations and file names.
The result reports how many characters were converted and how many syllables came out, which differ when a phrase absorbs several characters at once. The dictionary is inlined with the plugin, so nothing is fetched and nothing is uploaded.
✨ Key Features
- Three outputs: with tone marks, without them, or first letters
- A polyphone dictionary resolved by longest match
- Over twenty six thousand characters, covering common and extended ranges
- In the plain form the marked letter becomes a v, as input methods use
- Reports the character count and the syllable count
- Dictionary inlined: no network, nothing uploaded
🚀 How to Use
- Paste the Chinese text on the left
- Pick an output form on the right: tone marks, plain, or first letters
- Press process, or use Ctrl plus Enter
- The result box shows the pinyin with character and syllable counts
- Copy result puts it on your clipboard
⚠️ Things to Note
- Data source: Built on the standard pinyin for common characters, with over twenty six thousand single characters and eight thousand polyphone phrases, loaded locally with the plugin
- How polyphones are resolved: The longest matching phrase wins; when no phrase is found the usual reading of the character is used
- Rare characters may stay as they are: A very obscure character not in the table is passed through rather than having a reading guessed for it
- Non-Chinese text is preserved: Punctuation, digits and Latin letters come through unchanged
- Privacy: Everything runs in the browser. What you paste is never sent to a server