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. It appears that Denisowski is no longer maintaining CEDICT and that there are now two independent forks of it, updated by volunteers. One is at mandarintools.com/cedict.html and the other (updated more frequently) at http://www.mdbg.net/cedictwiki/. 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... It has been suggested that Pinyin method be merged into this article or section. ...

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, although it does not use CEDICT for its data on the definitions and pronunciations of individual characters. The Unihan Database is an online database which aims to provide information about each Han character of the Universal Character Set. ...

CEDICT was inspired by the EDICT Japanese dictionary project that Jim Breen started in 1991. An edict is an announcement of a law, often associated with monarchism. ...

The basic format of a CEDICT entry is:

 Traditional Simplified [pin1 yin1] /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. UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... GB2312 is the registered internet name for a key official character set of the Peoples Republic of China, used for simplified Chinese characters. ... Big-5 or Big5 is a character encoding method used in Taiwan (Republic of China) and Hong Kong for Traditional Chinese characters. ...

Features:

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

As of October 2006, it has about 37,749 Chinese entries[1].

Sub-projects

CEDICT has shown the way to some other projects, such HanDeDict (88.000 Chinese entries), the Chinese-German free dictionary. A CFDICT Chinese-French dictionary project is under discussion.

External links

• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary uses CEDICT, supports adding / editing entries and offers recent CEDICT downloads.
• more information on the formatting of CEDICT
• more information on the improving CEDICT
• Example of CEDICT data for the han character " 中 ", use by Unihan (Section "Chinese Compounds")
• Chinese-English Dictionary - CEDICT implementation with options to enter search terms as English, pinyin, Simplified or Traditional Chinese, and to choose Chinese output as either text or GIF format.
• DimSum, a dictionary program that uses CEDICT
• A free online dictionary using the CEDICT database

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