Pinyin to Chinese Converter

What this tool can and cannot guess

Turning pinyin into Chinese characters is not a conversion, it is a guess, and the reason is worth knowing before you rely on the result. Mandarin has a few hundred distinct syllables for tens of thousands of characters, so homophones are everywhere. The syllable shi alone corresponds to dozens of common characters. Written without tones, as this tool accepts it, the ambiguity is greater still.

What the tool does is match your text against the words it knows, longest first, and prefer the most common reading. That works well on ordinary vocabulary and on set phrases, because a two-syllable word is far less ambiguous than either of its syllables alone. It works poorly on personal names, on place names outside the well- known ones, and on anything technical.

So treat the output as a first draft rather than an answer. If a word matters, look it up in the dictionary and check that the characters mean what you expect. And if you want to write Chinese properly rather than decode it, the input method editor is the tool for that: it offers you the candidates instead of choosing one for you.