The best Chinese dictionary apps and sites (and what each is for)

"Best Chinese dictionary" is really two different searches. Sometimes you want a lookup box - paste a character, get a gloss. Sometimes you want the dictionary to also be the place where the word gets learned: readings, examples, audio, stroke order, spaced review. The honest answer is that no single tool wins both, so most serious learners run a lookup tool and a learning tool side by side.

The apps worth installing

Pleco is the reference Chinese-English dictionary and still the deepest: licensed titles (ABC, Oxford), OCR camera lookup, handwriting input and a decade of add-ons. The core is free, the famous features are paid add-ons. It is a dictionary first - there are flashcards, but no guided syllabus. LinZi vs Pleco, feature by feature.

LinZi pairs a 50,000-entry dictionary with the curriculum: every entry carries pinyin and zhuyin, Simplified and Traditional forms, a spoken example and stroke order, and any word drops into the FSRS deck in one tap. The dictionary is free - including on the web, no install.

HelloChinese glosses inside lessons but has no dictionary to browse; Du Chinese has excellent tap-to-gloss inside its stories and nothing outside them. Both are learning apps with glosses, not dictionaries.

The sites worth bookmarking

LinZi's web dictionary is the same dataset as the app: search by either script, toned or toneless pinyin, zhuyin or English; every entry links a full page like 水 or 龙 with readings, radical, etymology and cumulative stroke-order diagrams. MDBG and YellowBridge are the long-running free references; Wiktionary is the fallback for etymology rabbit holes.

What a good Chinese dictionary actually needs

• Both scripts. An entry that only shows Simplified is useless the day you open a Taiwanese menu or a Hong Kong novel.
• Pinyin and zhuyin. If you study in Taiwan, a dictionary without zhuyin (ㄅㄆㄇ) cannot tell you how a word is actually read there.
• A real example, spoken. Glosses are notoriously fuzzy; a natural sentence with audio in both accents disambiguates instantly.
• Stroke order and components. Characters stick when you see how they are built, not as bitmaps.

So which one?

Deepest lookup: Pleco. Learning with the dictionary attached: LinZi. Quick web lookup with no install: linzi.app/dict. Most learners end up with a Pleco-style lookup tool plus a curriculum - the comparison pages break down where each app leads.