Information about this dictionary:

Apparently, we were the first ones who were crazy enough to think that western people might want a combined Chinese, Japanese, and Buddhist dictionary.

A lot of westerners can't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese - and there is a reason for that. Chinese characters and even whole words were borrowed by Japan from the Chinese language in the 5th century. Much of the time, if a word or character is used in both languages, it will have the same or a similar meaning. However, this is not always true. Language evolves, and meanings independently change in each language.

Example: The Chinese character for soup (hot water) has come to mean bath (hot water) in Japanese. They have the same root meaning of "hot water", but a sign on a bath house in Japan would lead a Chinese person to think it was a place to get a bowl of soup. See this: Soup/Bath

This dictionary uses the EDICT and CC-CEDICT dictionary files.
EDICT data is the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, and are used in conformance with the Group's licence. Combined, these cover about 250,000 Japanese and Chinese characters, words, idioms, and short phrases.

Just because a word appears here does not mean it is appropriate for a tattoo, your business name, etc. Please consult a professional before doing anything stupid with this data.

We do offer Chinese and Japanese Tattoo Services. We'll also be happy to help you translate something for other purposes.

We've made a bunch of images to depict various Asian characters above. We've done the most common 10,000 characters used in Japanese and Chinese, but there are another 10,000 or so rare characters that we still need to add. We are working on this, so please forgive the "red X images".

No warranty as to the correctness, potential vulgarity, or clarity is expressed or implied. We did not write any of these definitions (though we occassionally act as a contributor/editor to the CC-CEDICT project). This is a free dictionary, and you get what you pay for.