Google’s Chinese dictionary is provided by Oxford Languages.

Oxford Languages is the world’s leading dictionary publisher, with over 150 years of experience creating and delivering authoritative dictionaries globally in more than 50 languages.

What is included in this dictionary?

This Chinese dictionary is widely considered to be the leading Simplified Chinese dictionary available. It features over 10,000 character entries, 100,000 defined terms, and 80,000 examples to provide accurate and meaningful guidance on how the Chinese language is spoken and written around the world.

How do we create our dictionaries?

At Oxford Languages, we are committed to an evidence-based approach to creating dictionaries in order to provide the most accurate picture of a language.

The evidence we use to create our dictionaries comes from real-life examples of spoken and written language. Our lexicographers analyse genuine uses of words collected from these sources to determine a word’s definition, spelling, and grammatical behaviour, and to offer guidance on a word’s use based on this research.

This evidence-based approach to creating a dictionary is known as descriptive lexicography. Our dictionaries aim to describe the way languages are and have been used by people around the world, rather than attempting to prescribe the way a language should be used.

We apply stringent quality checks to all dictionaries produced or acquired by our expert team so our users can feel confident in our ability to accurately and meaningfully represent their language.

Why do we include vulgar and offensive words in our dictionaries?

The role of a descriptive dictionary is to record the existence and meaning of all words in a language, and to clearly identify their status. We include vulgar or offensive words in our dictionaries because such terms are a part of a language’s lexicon. However, we label in our dictionaries words that fit into these categories to reflect their vulgar or offensive status and usage in the language.

We monitor how offensive language changes over time and integrate the changes we observe into our dictionaries to reflect real-life usage. Any changes that are made to our dictionaries are based on empirical evidence collected and analysed through our language research programme.

We are always grateful when users inform us of cases they believe do not meet our rigorous quality standards, whether due to changing cultural sensitivities or for other reasons.

How do we source our example sentences?

Example sentences are real-life examples selected to help people understand words in the context in which they are commonly used. These sentences do not replace our definitions but give additional context.

Our expert team of lexicographers pull all of our descriptive example sentences from real-life sources collected in our multi-billion-word corpora.

The team analyses evidence to select example sentences that present a word in the typical grammatical and semantic context without distracting from the essential information the definition conveys.

We do our best to eliminate example sentences that contain factually incorrect, prejudiced, or offensive statements from real-life sources and always welcome feedback on specific cases you feel do not meet our rigorous quality standards so that we can review and update our dictionaries.