CEDICT: Chinese-English Dictionary

This website is a continuation of the CEDICT project started by Paul Denisowski. It aims to provide a complete Chinese to English dictionary with pronunciation in pinyin for the Chinese characters. CEDICT is merely a text file, other programs are needed to search and display it. CEDICT was inspired by the EDICT Japanese dictionary project of Jim Breen. See the CEDICT readme file for more information on the formatting and usage of the dictionary.

If you are interested in Cantonese, check out CantoDict.

For Chinese-German, see HanDeDict: the Chinese-German Dictionary project (Chinesisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch HanDeDict).

Download CEDICT

Latest Release: 21 December 2005

Many thanks to Mark Swofford for a huge set of China and Taiwan place names. New entries and corrections from Ron Molenda and Erik Peterson. Many new entries from Brian Schack (assisted by Becky Chou, Carolina Chang, Cecilia Shih, Ching Lee, Christie Qiu, Eva Yan, Grace Tseng, Harriet Chou, Jill Cheng, Kathy Chen, Rebecca Ying, Teresa Liang and Zoe Way).

Dictionary Totals 

  UTF8 Defs:  34608
  GB   Words: 31200, Defs: 31992
  Big5 Words: 33903, Defs: 34553

Older versions of CEDICT can be found at the Monash Nihongo ftp Archive.

Submitting New Entries

CEDICT contributors can now use an automated submission page to contribute new entries to CEDICT. It checks for proper CEDICT format, for possible pinyin errors, and to see if the entries are already in CEDICT.

You can also send new entries for the dictionary to "cedict AT chinesetools.com" (replace AT with @). If you are looking for a Chinese translation of an English word, please use the search websites listed below instead of e-mailing to this address.

The UTF-8 version is the version from which I derive the GB and Big5 versions. So Unicode is the preferred encoding for new entries, but I am happy to accept any format.

The basic format of a CEDICT entry is:
Chinese [pinyin] /English equivalent 1/equivalent 2/

First is the Chinese word (with no spaces) followed by a single space.

The pinyin should follow in the format below:

The English equivalents(s) should be have a slash at beginning and end and between separate English equivalents for the same Chinese head word. For example:

中文 [zhong1 wen2] /Chinese language/

Please respect the copyright of other dictionaries. Do not directly copy entries from them; I will reject any entries that are just copies from other copyrighted printed and electronic dictionaries.

CEDICT Mailing List

The CEDICT mailing list is a place to discuss issues related to CEDICT, including specific dictionary entries, Chinese lexicography in general, as well as possible future directions for the CEDICT project. New CEDICT releases are also announced on the mailing list.

To join the list, either visit CEDICT mailing list info page and follow the instructions there, or send an e-mail with the subject line of subscribe to cedict-request@lists.chinesecomputing.com .

Programs Using CEDICT