The Moe Dictionary is a monolingual Chinese dictionary. I think it’s relatively new(?) 1 and it seems pretty cool. I like it so far. Here’s a bookmarklet for it:
- MoeDict/萌
- Source code:
javascript:(function(){var%20w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else%20if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else%20if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open("https://www.moedict.tw/#"+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank");})()
Notes:
- Correction: It’s based on the pre-existing — and well-respected — Taiwan Ministry of Education Dictionary, but with a much faster, cleaner interface ↩
the entries are from the taiwan ministry of education dictionary that is also accesible on the web (台灣教育部，重編國語辭典修訂本）. it’s a good dictionary to stay monolingual and some kind of taiwan’s counterpart to china’s modern chinese dictionary (現代漢語詞典）. the moe dictionary is also available in google’s playstore and they frequently make updates, so i think there are some enthusiastic people behind the project.
I’ve been using this one for a long time. I find it the best for classical Chinese and obscure words that you don’t find in the 現代漢語辭典.
As it uses quite a bit of formal or classical Chinese, though, it’s probably not the best for beginners.
Most of the examples given come from classical texts. Most of the rest come from early vernacular books, like 紅樓夢. It’s a big, authoritative dictionary, but it’s hardly where you want to look for examples of modern usage.
Nor is it really the “best” dictionary for classical Chinese, contrary to what Pingfa said above. That title would arguably belong to Morohashi Tetsuji’s (yes, it’s Chinese->Japanese) 大漢和辞典.
But it is pretty sweet for what it is, especially with the shiny new interface. It’s also the best place to go if you want to know how a word is pronounced in Taiwan as opposed to China, because there are significant differences.
this is the best version, if you can figure out what to do therewith:
github.com/g0v/moedict-data