etymology of SIMPLIFIED characters - on (& off) line resources

[onebir]

zhongwen.com is pretty good for the traditional characters, but i was wondering if there's an equally good site for the simplified ones...

the traditonal character edition of the mcnaughton & li book ('reading chinese') is good for those, but i was also wondering if the simplified character edition is any good...

[atitarev]

It's about the same, only reverse. They have a lot of typos, some wrong page references for radicals plus they go into details on the basic characters but not enough info on more complex ones. Only useful for the first 1,000 characters, IMHO both editions. I also have the same book for Japanese characters

Also, I think those 1,000 something characters could be fit into a pocket-size book, it's a lot of waste of paper. You should see Kodansha's Learners' Japanese kanji dictionaries for comparison.

You may find the dictionaries useful depending on your level and what other resources you have.

Wenlin (expensive) and Wakan (free) software have much info on chracater etymology, stroke order, readings, pronunciation.

[Josh-J]

Wenlin (expensive) and Wakan (free) software have much info on chracater etymology, stroke order, readings, pronunciation.

Wakan does give pronunciation, stroke order, etc. but it doesn't tell you much etomology-wise except the radical - it doesn't give details like zhongwen.com does like which radicals are phonetic components. It will give you the 'meaning' of the radical but won't tell you what the other components of the character are.

[Ole]

You can try www.internationalscientific.org

Ole

[jmcbride]

Clavis Sinica's text reader and dictionary program provides some etymological information as well. It also gives you the breakdown of each character into radical and phonetic parts, and (most importantly) shows you lists of other characters using these same component parts.

[jlau]

The Etymology Tab of the YellowBridge Dictionary will show the character decomposition and meaning for all characters, traditional or simplified. This is usually good enough for characters formed of a phonetic and a signific compoments (the great majority). However, YellowBridge is still incomplete as far as providing historical notes for characters that are purely pictographic or ideographic in nature.