Dictionaries

[h2]Simplified Character Dictionaries[/h2][h3]Beginners[/h3]

• Concise English-Chinese Chinese English Dictionary (精选英汉汉英词典)
  The Commercial Press & Oxford University Press

===Intermediate/Advanced===

• 现代汉语词典－汉英双语 (The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary- Chinese English Edition)
  Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
  
• 应用汉语词典
  Has nice usage examples and comparison between similar words
  
• 多功能学生成语词典
  Chengyu dictionary targeted towards Chinese elementary and high school students. An extensive index allows you to find all chengyu's that have a particular character, regardless of the position of the character in the chengyu. Each chengyu entry has example sentences, and a list of antonym and synonym chengyu's.
  

===Synonym/Antonym Dictionaries===

• 学生同义词反义词辨析词典
  
• 现代汉语同义词词典

===Specialized Dictionaries===

• 汉英逆引词典 (A Reverse Chinese-English Dictionary)
  The Commercial Press
  
• 现代汉语常用词用法词典
  中国书籍出版社
  

===Classical Chinese===

• 古汉语常用字字典
  Character-based dictionary
  
• 古代汉语词典
  Word-based dictionary
  
• 学生常用古代汉语词典
  Word-based dictionary

[h2]Traditional Character Dictionaries[/h2][h3]Beginners[/h3]

• Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary (遠東漢字三千字典)
  The Far East Book Co., Ltd.

• Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary (遠東拼音漢英辭典)
  The Far East Book Co., Ltd.

For traditional characters I highly reccomend anything by The Far East Book Co., Ltd. There based in Taiwan. Here's their English website: http://eng.fareast.com.tw/engweb/index1.php. The "3000 Most Frequently-Used Character" dictionary is awesome. The words are organized by hanyu pinyin, alphabetically, have stroke order diagrams, and also contain some phrases and chengyu. They have simplified Chinese versions available, also.

I'll add a simplified/traditional distinction to it and go ahead and add the one you recommend and then after feel free to add yourself as this is a compilation of all of our resources and experience.

I prettied up the formatting. You can use "

• " and "[*]" to create a bulleted list. (See

Added some dictionaries I have, including ones for chengyu, synonyms, and classical Chinese.

Okay, thanks a lot gato. I had some other dictionaries lying around too but they are not ones I think too too highly of so didn't want to recommend them

Yeah, probably shouldn't recommend stuff that you think is useless, unless you are trying to steer people away from it. Hehe.

Another quick question that is in regards to all of the wiki's: are we going to post a standard formatting method for it? It seems like we should (especially since I hate things that aren't nice looking and aren't uniform).

So basically a guide for formatting that needs to be followed for all the articles...

Good idea. You want to write one?

nah...I'm to much of a perfectionist and so am better following orders! I'll think about it and see what I come up with...

okay I got a quickie drawn up and need to know where to post it. Don't want to continue this discussion here as it is still the dictionary section. Should I just post it under the discussion on the main page of guide to chinese?

Create it as a new article in either of the wikis, that way anyone can edit it and once it's 'done' we can lock it.