Pleco Chinese Radical dictionaries

Posted Jan 2, 2024 Updated May 31, 2024

By Catus Felis 1 min read

Chinese Radical dictionaries

I created 3 radical Pleco dictionaries to help myself study Chinese characters, and now would like to share them with you. I hope you find them useful too. You’ll need Pleco Flashcard add-on to be able to load these dictionaries.

These can be used on any device such as Kindle, Boox, or Kobol and many dictionary app formats. Check the [Downloads] section.

Chinese Radical Lookup (RAL) dictionary which allows you to find the Chinese characters from component radicals if you know their names or shapes. You can search by choosing on screen or by searching their names. This can be pretty fast compared to other existing input methods
Chinese Character Component Dictionary (CHAR) allows you to see the components that make up a Chinese character (of about 12,000 characters)
Radical Name Dictionary (RAN) which has information for all 214 Kangxi Chinese radicals and their variants (about 650 in total)

See some images below.

1. Chinese Radical Lookup (RAL)

You see that the 栓 character has 3 radicals ⽊⼈⽟ in it, right? So you can type “mu ren yu” or “ren yu mu” to search for that little one. Another way is to go to the “homepage” marked by 偏旁 (piānpáng) headword and start browsing until you find that one character: ⽊ > ⽊⼈ > ⽊⼈⽟ and all characters which contain those three radicals.

My stats show that, with 5 or fewer radicals, you can reach 95% of all modern Chinese characters (96% for simplified characters). So searching for them using radicals is similar to using Roman alphabets.

2. Chinese Character Component Dictionary (CHAR)

This one breaks characters down into components for you to see, and maybe help you to remember them better.

This dictionary also includes mnemonics for ~4’000 characters thanks to Reinaert Albrecht wonderful data at Remembering Chinese characters, hanzi or kanji.