About Cidian

Cidian (詞典) is a free online Mandarin-English dictionary. It was created as a mini passion project to have easy, quick desktop access to a minimal lightweight Mandarin dictionary data.

Data Sources

Cidian uses data from the following sources:

• CC-CEDICT — A comprehensive Mandarin-English dictionary with over 120,000 entries, released under a Creative Commons license.
• CD-Dict — Character data including radicals, stroke counts, HSK levels, and frequency rankings.
• Wiktionary — Future etymology data for characters and words, released under CC BY-SA 4.0 (no relation!).

Features

A few highlights — for the full list of search options, wildcards, and filters, check out the search features guide.

• Character details: stroke count, radical, HSK level, and frequency.
• Search by Chinese characters (traditional or simplified).
• Search by pinyin with tone numbers (e.g., ni3hao3).
• Search by English language definitions.
• Both dark and light theme support.

Technology

Cidian is built with Python (FastAPI), SQLite, and vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The design is inspired by Jisho, an excellent Japanese dictionary. It was convo coded with Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, is hosted on Render, and finally served via Cloudflare.

Support

Cidian is free and always will be. If you find it useful, please consider supporting the site to help cover hosting and domain costs. Any and all support will go exclusively to this end. Thank you!