The CEDICT project was started by Paul Denisowski in 1997 with the aim to provide a complete Chinese to English dictionary with pronunciation in pinyin for the Chinese characters.

Contents 1 Content 2 History 3 Sub-projects 4 External links 5 See also

[edit] Content

CEDICT is merely a text file; other programs are needed to search and display it. This project is considered a standard Chinese-English reference on the Internet and is used by several other Chinese-English projects. The Unihan Database uses CEDICT data for most of its information about character compounds, but this is auxiliary and is explicitly not a part of the main Unicode database[1]. CEDICT is not used for Unihan's definitions and pronunciations of individual characters.

The basic format of a CEDICT entry is:

 Traditional Simplified [pin1 yin1] /American English equivalent 1/equivalent 2/ 中國 中国 [Zhong1 guo2] /China/Middle Kingdom/ 

CEDICT is now primarily encoded in UTF-8, but compatibility versions are available in GB2312 and Big5. The compatibility versions omit either the Traditional or the Simplified characters respectively.

Features:

• Traditional and Simplified Chinese
• Pinyin (several pronunciations)
• American English (several)

As of September 2008, it has 77,597 Chinese entries[2].

[edit] History

Year	Event
1991	EDICT Japanese dictionary project was started by Jim Breen.
1997	CEDICT project started by Paul Denisowski, on the model of EDICT.
1999	CEDICT ownership transferred to Erik Peterson of http://www.mandarintools.com/cedict.html.
2007	MDBG started a new project called CC-CEDICT which continues the CEDICT project with a new license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, allowing more projects to use it. Additionally a work flow[3] has been set up to streamline the process of submitting, reviewing and processing new entries.

[edit] Sub-projects

CEDICT has shown the way to some other projects, such HanDeDict (127.000 Chinese entries), the Chinese-German free dictionary. A CFDICT Chinese-French dictionary and a Hungrarian-Chinese dictionary project are under discussion. Some older CEDICT data is also found in the Adsotrans dictionary.

[edit] External links

• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary uses CC-CEDICT, supports adding / editing entries and offers recent CC-CEDICT downloads.
• more information on the formatting of CC-CEDICT
• Example of CEDICT data for the han character " 中 ", use by Unihan (Section "Chinese Compounds")
• DimSum, a dictionary program that uses CEDICT
• A free online dictionary using the CEDICT database
• ZDT Another free dictionary program that uses CEDICT
• Flashonary A Chinese-English Flashcard Dictionary for the iPhone & iPod Touch that uses CC-CEDICT
• 小词典 XiaoCiDian Chinese-English Dictionary application that uses CC-CEDICT
• DianHua Dictionary A Chinese-English dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch based on CC-CEDICT
• Character Mine A self-test program that uses CC-CEDICT
• Chinese Dictionaries Discussion group about Chinese->"foreign language" dictionaries
• PABLO a Chinese-English dictionary based on CC-CEDICT and incorporating many features such as stroke animations, handwriting recognition, multi-radical search, etc.
• WaKan Chinese-English dictionary based on CC-CEDICT.
• sinoScriptor a texteditor with many features for Chinese-Learners such vocabulary-frequency-ranking, pinyin-converter, radicals, strokes, wordbuilds, different font-visualisations, acoustical pronounciation. The vocabulary-translations based on CC-CEDICT and HaDeDict.
• philoQuick a Chinese-German-English dictionary which allows Chinese-Learners to find Chinese charakters in a few seconds without knowing their pinyin pronunciation. The vocabulary-translations based on CC-CEDICT and HaDeDict.
• The homepage of Paul Denisowski, the founder of CEDICT

[edit] See also

• Adsotrans