About MyCidian

MyCidian is a free, web-based Chinese-English dictionary designed for native English speakers.

MyCidian is heavily inspired by Jisho.org, my favorite Japanese dictionary website. One of my biggest priorities when designing MyCidian was convenience. I wanted looking up a word to be quick, simple, and actually useful for someone who is learning Chinese.

This project is the child of Zeb Barrett — that's me. With my basic IT skills, a lot of trial and error and the blood, sweat, and tears of Claude Code, and four very long nights in the basement, the first version of MyCidian was born.

This project is still ongoing and will only get better. It's free and staying that way. Web only, with no app planned. Ad-free for now; if that ever changes, signing in will remove them.

Some decisions

Passwords, not Google sign-in: Google is blocked in mainland China, and someone learning Chinese may well be studying or travelling there. Accounts stay same-origin so the site keeps working, and nothing third-party sits between a learner and their saved words.
Recent lookups stay in your browser: They're per-device and disposable, so there's nothing worth syncing and no search history kept on the server. Saved words are the part worth keeping, so those live on your account instead.
Every alternate form, not a guess: One simplified character can stand for several traditional ones — 发 is both 發 (to send) and 髮 (hair). Picking one to display would look cleaner and lose the distinction.

Where the data comes from

CC-CEDICT: The core dictionary.
Make Me a Hanzi: Stroke order, radicals and character composition.
HSK 3.0 word lists: Proficiency-level browsing.
Claude Haiku: An enrichment pass grouping senses and adding example sentences, plus a separate one tagging archaic and literary usage.
Qwen 2.5: Part-of-speech tags — noun, verb, adjective, adverb, idiom, measure word and others. Run locally (qwen2.5:7b-instruct-q4_K_M via Ollama), not through a hosted API.
Kokoro TTS: Synthesized pronunciation. Single-character readings often come out with the wrong tone — 妈 and 骂 can sound the same. Multi-syllable words are unaffected. Check the tone against the pinyin.

Credits

MyCidian is built on several openly licensed datasets. Every one currently in use is credited below, by name, with the licence it ships under.

CC-CEDICT: The core dictionary — headwords, pinyin and English definitions. Source, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Make Me a Hanzi — dictionary data: Character definitions, derived from Unihan and CJKlib. Source, licensed LGPL 3.0.
Make Me a Hanzi — stroke-order graphics: Stroke order animation, radicals and character decomposition, derived from the Arphic PL KaitiM GB and PL UKai fonts. Source, licensed under the Arphic Public License.
hanziDB.csv: Character frequency ranking. Source, licensed MIT.
HSK 3.0 word lists: Proficiency-level browsing, compiled from the public HSK 3.0 standard by two open-source projects: complete-hsk-vocabulary and hsk30, both licensed MIT.
wordfreq: Word frequency ranking, used to put the commoner word first when several entries share a meaning. Compiled by Robyn Speer at Luminoso (version 3.1.1). Source, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. MyCidian has changed the data: the frequencies are converted to a rank and matched to CC-CEDICT headwords.
The sources behind wordfreq's Chinese list: Wikipedia; OPUS OpenSubtitles 2018, from the OpenSubtitles project; SUBTLEX-CH, freely available data created by Marc Brysbaert et al. (Cai & Brysbaert, 2010); NewsCrawl 2014 and GlobalVoices news text; Google Books Ngrams 2012; web text from OSCAR; Twitter; and the word list distributed with the Jieba word segmenter.