Project:About

From Wenlin Dictionaries

The Wenlin Dictionaries Wiki is the home of several dictionaries and related tools for education, linguistics, and lexicography. We provide online access free of charge to a variety of resources, including abridged dictionaries. We also provide online access to additional resources, such as complete unabridged dictionaries and advanced software tools, on an affordable monthly subscription basis. We encourage all users to sign up at least for a free membership, which enables some features not available to anonymous users, such as setting preferences.

The dictionaries include:

  • The Wenlin Zidian (Wenlin Institute, Inc. SPC). Each entry describes a single Chinese character, with explanation in English, and connections to related characters and vocabulary. Its wiki namespace is 'Zi', for zìdiǎn 字典 (character dictionary). Sample entry: Zi:字
  • The ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary (John DeFrancis et al.). This is a dictionary of Mandarin Chinese words and phrases, with glosses (definitions) and translations in English. Its wiki namespace is 'Ci', for cídiǎn 词典 (dictionary of words). Sample entry: cídiǎn
  • The ABC English-Chinese Dictionary (John DeFrancis, Zhang Yanyin, et al.). The entries describe English words, with glosses and translations in Mandarin Chinese. Its wiki namespace is 'En', for English. Sample entry: tiger

Please see also the Acknowledgments section of the user's guide for our desktop software.

We license our dictionaries and technologies to other organizations, and are always eager to expand our network of relationships.

We're also the makers of Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese, desktop software for Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux, offering many capabilities that are currently beyond what our website can do. Please see wenlin.com to learn more.