Many of the Chinese dictionaries on the web are interlinked at a character-to-character level, allowing visitors to jump across dictionaries to check the same character entry without having to search again for the character. Find a character in any of the above dictionaries and you can follow the blue links, jumping between more than a dozen dictionaries spread across seven countries and four continents. (I once gave a brief talk on this phenomenon.)

Enter a character in the left frame to go directly to any of the major dictionaries via the red links, including the WWW CJK-English Dictionary (Japanese code), the Buddhist Dictionary (Japanese code), the Cantonese Pronunciation Dictionary, the CEDICT Chinese English Dictionary Project, the Hakka Dictionary, Guoyu Cidian, the WWW JDIC (Japanese code), Chinese Character Dictionary, Online Chinese Character Dictionary, the Tower of Babel etymology database, the Unicode Unihan database, and my own Chinese Characters: a Genealogy and Dictionary. Also see Pristine Lexicon, Sunrain, TigerNT, Chindex, and Radicode.

Use this feature to automatically add definition links to all the characters in a Chinese text. Then just click on any character to see its definition in any of the web dictionaries.

Paste in any text and indicate whether the characters are in traditional character encoding or simplified character encoding:

Looking for texts to paste in and read? See the "News" section at Zhongwen.com or try these magazines: Huaxia Wenzhai, New Threads, On-line Chinese Magazines

If you have Chinese etexts and would like to add automatic links into them, you can use the CGI program used here. Paste in the text, use View to see the html code with links, and then paste in the new code to your page. Or you can add in the links directly yourself. To link in a Big-5 character the html code is "http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zi.cgi?b5=xx" where xx is the Big-5 Chinese character. Similarly for a GB character the code is "http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zi.cgi?gb=yy" where yy is the GB Chinese character.

Maintained by Rick Harbaugh.