This Chinese/English dictionary provides a searchable interfacefor the CEDICT dictionary put together by Paul Denisowksi. Searches can be conducted by Chinese (using either the GB, Big5, or Unicode encodings), pinyin, or English. Results will show the Chinese word,the pinyin representation of the word, and the English definition.You can click on the Chinese word to get a GIF picture of it. You canalso click on the pinyin to hear how it is pronounced.
When searching by Chinese you can tell thedictionary to find entries that start with the characters, end withthe characters, or have the characters anywhere within the final word.You can also ask to only return the Chinese entries that exactly matchthe word being sought.
When searching by pinyin, you must include a spacebetween the different pinyin syllables. You can include or excludetone numbers (1-4 and 5 for the neutral tone). For example, if youwere looking for the word for television set, you would type "dian shiji" or "dian4 shi4 ji1" or "dian shi4 ji" (but without the quotes).All would work. But remember to include the space and set thedictionary to look for pinyin, and not Chinese characters or English.As with the Chinese characters, you can direct the dictionary to findentries that have the pinyin at the beginning, end, anywhere, or asthe whole entry. You can return the results in GB, Big5 or UTF-8Unicode.
When searching by English, searches are not casesensitive. Since this is designed as mainly an Chinese to English andnot English to Chinese dictionary, if you can't find the word you arelooking for, you may be able to find it using a synonym. Also, youmay get many unrelated entries that use the word in the Englishdefinition but do not give the equivalent Chinese for it. You canreturn the results in either GB, Big5, or UTF-8 Unicode.
To search by radical/stroke order, please usemy Character Dictionary. You can searchusing a table of radicals and the remaining stroke count of acharacter. From the list of characters that are returned, you canclick on the character to get a list of all words in the dictionarythat start with that character. This will only work however if theresults are set to be returned as GB, Big5 or Unicode and not asGIF's.