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.
FAQ
No questions here yet — this page is waiting on content.
That is not a placeholder apology: there is nothing here because nobody has asked anything yet. Ask something below and it will shape what ends up on this page.
Contact
- Not set up yet.
Check the FAQ first — your question may already be answered there.
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.
See About for how MyCidian is built, or ask a question if something here needs a correction.
Printable Chinese Character Practice Sheets
Blank grids for practicing Chinese character strokes by hand — print a sheet and write directly on the boxes. The solid lines mark each box; the lighter dashed lines are proportion guides, not part of the character.
田字格 (tián zì gé)
The standard grid. Each box is split into quadrants, for judging where a stroke sits relative to the character's centre.
-
20 mm boxes — largest
田字格 sheet, 20 mm boxes (PDF) -
18 mm boxes
田字格 sheet, 18 mm boxes (PDF) -
17 mm boxes — most per page
田字格 sheet, 17 mm boxes (PDF)
米字格 (mǐ zì gé)
Adds diagonal guides on top of the quadrant lines, for placing strokes that run corner to corner.
-
20 mm boxes — largest
米字格 sheet, 20 mm boxes (PDF) -
18 mm boxes
米字格 sheet, 18 mm boxes (PDF) -
17 mm boxes — most per page
米字格 sheet, 17 mm boxes (PDF)
All sheets are A4. Printing on Letter paper? Select "Fit to page" in your print dialog so the grid isn't cropped.
Recent