In my opinion, one of the most valuable projects on the web is Jim Breen's world-famous EDICT project -- an entire family of freely available Japanese-English dictionaries for a variety of fields. Having been both a user of and a (very small) contributor to these dictionaries, I've become very interested in the concept of collaborative, downloadable (as opposed to searchable-only), public-domain dictionary building and hence have started one for Mandarin Chinese.

As you may have guessed from my last name, I am NOT a native speaker of Chinese, and my knowledge of Chinese (written and spoken) leaves an almost unbelievably great deal to be desired. As such, corrections are VERY welcome and would be much appreciated. Contributions are also encouraged and will of course receive both proper credit and heartfelt thanks. Please also read the CEDICT readme file for general information about CEDICT and contribution guidelines.

As mentioned above, this dictionary is public domain and permission is given to use it for any non-commerical purposes (i.e. don't try to make money from it). The license agreement (a shameless copy of the EDICT license agreement) is attached as Appendix A of the CEDICT readme file.

CEDICT related links:
・CquickTrans is basically a Chinese dictionary that integrates kanji (hanzi) lookup and dictionary lookup with the windows clipboard. It integrates a study list builder into the interface allowing drag-n-drop study list building and lots of other stuff.
・I'm pleased to announce that Daisy Fung has put together a version of CEDICT for the PalmPilot. Please visit Daisy's site for the program and additional information.
・CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) Information Processing, the long-awaited and much-anticipated sequel to Ken Lunde's "Understanding Japanese Information Processing" is now available and I'm happy to say that CEDICT has a mention in it as well.
・Erik Peterson's Mandarin Tools Page provides a simple yet flexible way of using CEDICT via your web browser. It also lets you listen to the entries using Bell Lab's Chinese speech synthesizer.
・Otfried Cheong's DIC application allows Psion owners to use CEDICT (and MANY other dictionaries as well).
・CEDICT also includes the vocaulary files donated from Ocrat's "Learn Mandarin with the VOA" project. You can find this and other very useful Chinese resources at the Ocrat Chinese Pages.
・A source for many CEDICT-related tools is Hiebeler's Chinese Stuff. Dave has written a number of tools that can be used with CEDICT and has also entered the vocabulary lists for PCR Book 3 and contributed them to CEDICT as well.
・Chris Cannam's site provides a Chinese Big5 annotator which uses CEDICT. This is an excellent tool for learning to read Chinese.
・Richard Warmington has written CEL (Chinese-English lookup) -- a Windows front-end into CEDICT.
・For people using the excellent NJSTAR Chinese Word Processor, there is also a version in NJSTAR user dictionary format, thanks to some very useful tools kindly provided by NJStar's creator, Hongbo Ni. At the request of some users, I'm also including some brief instructions. If you want to save download time and bandwidth by generating the three .dic files yourself, you can also download the tools themselves.

If you're interested in receiving email when there are new CEDICT updates, just send me email with the words "subscribe cedict" in the subject field.

Many thanks to Jim Breen, whose EDICT project served as the inspiration to CEDICT, and who has very graciously allowed the CEDICT files to be stored at the Monash Nihongo ftp site.

Due to other demands on my time and a drop-off in the level of contributions, CEDICT has more or less gone into hibernation mode. Hopefully I'll find some time to work in the updates/corrections I've received and due a new release sometime in the not too distant future.

・CEDICT readme file
・CEDICT in Big 5 format (last update 1 November 1998 - 23510 entries)
・CEDICT in GB format
・NJSTAR User Dictionary Files, in ready-to-use format
・Tools for generating the three NJSTAR .dic files yourself

Alternately, use the Monash mirror site nearest you:

USA (California), UK, Canada, USA (Texas), USA (Washington), USA (Utah), Japan, Finland, Germany

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Contributions? - Send mail

Please note that I'm checking email somewhat infrequently. Also, if you're interested in the translation of a certain word or what a particular Chinese character looks like, please check out Erik Peterson's Mandarin Tools Page or one of the other links above.

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