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 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

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, by HSK 3.0 level. A word the 3.0 lists leave out keeps its HSK 2.0 level.

Example sentences

Over 70,000 checked sentences. About 51,000 were written by Qwen3.8-27B running locally; the rest (about 20,000) are older Claude Haiku examples. They were checked by Claude Sonnet, with a native-speaker spot check (94% natural in a 50-sentence sample). A few hundred older, unchecked Haiku examples are still shown where no checked sentence exists.

Claude Haiku

An enrichment pass grouping senses, plus a separate one tagging archaic and literary usage.

Built by Zeb Barrett

FAQ

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Ask any questions you may have! Send advice, recommendations, or criticism as well. Nothing helps more than eyes from another angle!

Contact

Email

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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.

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.

See About for how MyCidian is built, or ask a question if something here needs a correction.

Practice sheets

Blank grids for practicing Chinese character strokes by hand — print a sheet and write till your hand falls off

田字格 (tián zì gé)

Quadrant guides for proportion. The standard.

• 

  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 diagonals, for placing slanted strokes.

• 

  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.