How to know if a character can be used by itself?

[Friday]

I find that my Chinese-English dictionary gives definitions for all characters. I think that sometimes, perhaps, individual characters have their own meaning, however, it is quite rare for some to ever appear free-standing without some other neighboring character helping them to form words. How can I determine if a character alone forms a word or if it is generally only used together with other characters before it is a word?

[cababunga]

You can try to see if there is a compound with higher frequency then the character by itself. For example here we can see that the character 蝴 most often used as part of 蝴蝶.

[Hofmann]

That frequency column pwns.

[Chief123]

What about using something like the Top Huayu list or HSK list? Those definitely show individual characters/words. That wouldn't cover all characters - not by a long shot - but would be a start.

[Olle Linge]

That frequency column pwns.

Yeah, every dictionary should have one. A pity 蝴蝶效應 isn't used more.

[Gharial]

The ABC ECCE dictionary seems quite useful for this. Discussion of it and crickets (not butterflies! ) here: http://www.chinese-f...ual-characters/

[tooironic]

My blog posts on One-Character Verbs and One-Character Adjectives might also be of use.

[Friday]

Thanks, those are all very helpful.

[Danny2312]

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