CEDICT

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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/.

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.

CEDICT was inspired by the EDICT Japanese dictionary project that Jim Breen started in 1991.

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.

Features:

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

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

[edit] 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.