About Zhongwen
Zhongwen is a pop-up dictionary for Chinese. Hover over a character or word on any page and a small window shows the pinyin and the English meaning. It is made by Christian Schiller, it is free and open source under the GPL, and it uses the widely used CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary.
The features are aimed at learners. It supports simplified and traditional characters and can show only one set. Pinyin syllables are coloured by tone. You can move the pop-up to the next character or word from the keyboard, and it links to the Chinese Grammar Wiki. You can add words to a built-in list and export it as a text file, for example for Anki, and it can send words to Skritter.
It is deliberately simple. It has no lessons, subtitles or spaced repetition of its own, and covers Mandarin to English only. When we checked, the Firefox listing was on an older version than Chrome's. The developer declares in the Chrome listing that it does not collect or use your data, and it needs access to the pages you read. For a light Chinese lookup tool that stays out of the way, try this.
Pros and cons
- Free and open source, with simplified and traditional characters
- Colours pinyin by tone, with links to grammar notes
- Built-in word list you can export, for example to Anki
- Declares that it collects no data
- Mandarin and English only
- Word-list export is a plain text file
- The Firefox version has lagged behind Chrome
Permissions
It asks for access to all websites so it can read the text under your cursor, plus context menu and tab access.
