Chinese-English Dictionary
Online English Chinese Dictionary. Chinese integrates both the meaning and pronunciation information of its characters. You can search in the dictionary in Chinese, English, Pinyin, or by radical, stroke number, Cangjie, Sijiao, Wubi... You can use the Hand Writing Recognition too.
How to search a Chinese dictionary when you cannot read Chinese
A Chinese dictionary asks a question that an alphabetical one never does: how do you look up a word whose pronunciation you do not know and whose shape you cannot type? Four answers have been in use for centuries, and this dictionary supports all of them.
By sound, if you have heard the word: type it in pinyin, with or without tone numbers. By meaning, if you met it in translation: type the English word and read the Chinese that comes back. By hand, if you saw it written: draw the character with the mouse or a finger and let the handwriting recognition find it. And by structure, which is the classical method and still the fastest for an unknown character on paper: every character contains a radical, one of a fixed set of components that traditional dictionaries sort by, and searching by radical plus stroke count will find it.
Each entry carries more than a translation. The traditional form beside the simplified one, the pronunciation to listen to, the HSK level when the word has one, the decomposition of the character, and example sentences showing the word in use, which is usually what settles a doubt between two words that look interchangeable.
If you are learning towards the official proficiency test, the vocabulary of each level is listed in full below, and every word links back into this dictionary.