Pleco Chinese Dictionary
Pleco is the ultimate Chinese learning companion
- an integrated Chinese English dictionary / document reader / flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input and live camera-based character lookups, from a company with 16 years' experience making mobile Chinese learning software.
Major features: ($ = paid add-on)
• Great dictionaries: the free app comes with two dictionaries
- CC-CEDICT and our in-house PLC dictionary
- which together cover 130,000 Chinese words and include 20,000 example sentences with Pinyin. We offer 8 more free dictionaries as optional downloads, including a 22,000-entry Cantonese-English dictionary, and 19 other great dictionaries are available as paid upgrades. ($)
• Handwriting input: lookup unknown characters by drawing them, with a best-in-class recognition engine. (basic version free, enhanced version $)
• Live Optical Character Recognizer (OCR): look up Chinese words in the dictionary simply by pointing your device's camera at them, or by scrolling around a still image. ($)
• Screen Reader/OCR: instantly tap-lookup Chinese words in other apps through a floating interface; works on Android 4.1 and later. Especially useful in chat apps like WeChat. (reader free, OCR $)
• Flashcard System: create a card from any dictionary entry with a single button tap, import premade word lists, use advanced techniques like SRS (spaced repetition), and study in a variety of modes including fill-in-the-blanks and tone drills. (simple version free, full-featured $)
• Audio Pronunciation: instantly hear male + female native-speaker audio for Chinese dictionary headwords; recordings available for over 34,000 words. (stitched-syllable free, multi-syllable $) Or listen to example sentences with text-to-speech (system TTS free, enhanced $).
• Powerful search: look up words by Chinese characters, Pinyin (spaces/tones optional), or a combination, with support for wildcards and full-text search.
• Cross-referencing: tap on any Chinese character / word in any dictionary entry to bring up its definition.
• Stroke Order Diagrams: animations showing you how to draw each Chinese character; 500 in free app, 28,000 in paid add-on.
• Voice Recognition: look up words by speaking them into your device's microphone.
• Document Reader: open a Chinese-language text or PDF file and look up unknown words in the dictionary simply by tapping on them. ($) You can also look up characters on web pages through "Share" and in other documents through the clipboard. (free)
• Mainland
- and Taiwan-friendly: supports traditional and simplified characters (in dictionary definitions, stroke order, search, OCR, and handwriting), and supports Zhuyin (with ruby support) as well as Pinyin for pronunciation display.
• Cantonese: display headwords + perform searches in Jyutping/Yale romanization. We also offer Cantonese dictionary and Cantonese audio add-ons. (some $)
• No ads: we won't even nag you about buying add-ons.
We also offer excellent customer support
- send us an email and see for yourself
- and an active user community at plecoforums.com.
We've been making Chinese dictionary apps since 2000, and our sales and customer base have been steadily growing for 15 years across four different platforms. We take good care of our longtime users: people who bought a dictionary on a Palm Pilot in 2001 can still use that dictionary on a new Android phone in 2015 without even paying an upgrade fee. You can be confident we'll be fixing bugs and adding features for many years to come.
Paid add-ons can be moved to a new device like any other paid app; just open our free app on your new device and they should reactivate.
If you already own Pleco on another OS, see pleco.com/android for migration options.
Twitter/Facebook: plecosoft
Category : Books & Reference
Reviews (25)
Search interface to offline dictionaries, some free, good ones for purchase. App not grammar oriented. Queries return all occurances regardless of relevance or usage, so beware! Good OCR except off display screens and easily confused by any background. Prononciation for purchase is excellent. App design is oldish, feels patched and its use is sometimes awkward. Never feels far from a regexp search... While font sizes etc can be configured, no convenient long press or friendly menus. Cult app :-)
I love the app, but I want to urge you to fix a bug. The screen reader is an absolute lifesaver in many cases, but when copying the text it always adds random spaces between characters, which many apps don't like, and I end up spending a minute of frustration deleting the spaces. This really can be coded better. Super frustrating
I've enjoyed this app for years and I'm still discovering new great features. It's completely usable in offline mode, something essential for me. This is the only Chinese dictionary you need for both beginners and advanced users.
It s been over a decade since my first steps in chinese and since i have been using pleco. Definitely one of the best dictionaries for studying chinese.
Fast, accurate English-->Chinese, Chinese-->English dictionary. Supports handwritten chinese characters. Ad free.
The best chinese dictionary app, been with it since 2017. You can use it offline as well, and user interface is very friendly and easy. You can also quiz yourself with flash cards, if you want. You can search using pinyin, or hand write, and it even works the other way around, just type the english words. Overall, highly-rated app.
This is one of the best-designed, most smoothly-performing apps of any kind that I've ever used. A fast and amazingly powerful Chinese dictionary app that lets you search and browse words and characters in every way you could imagine. The free version is optimized for searching Chinese-to-English definitions, not so great if you need to find the best Chinese translation of an English word, but you can fix that with a reasonably-priced paid English-to-Chinese dictionary add-on. I only wish there was a Windows version for my laptop (I'd pay for it). And I think the flashcard system could use some improvements - it has some benefits over Anki, but I don't seem to memorize words as fast with it.
This an amazing app. It's ability to interpret the character you draw on the screen with just your finger is uncanny. Did you draw something awful? No problem. This app figures out what character you're probably trying to draw! Very easy to navigate and there is amazing detail on how each character is used with other characters. Very sophisticated vocabulary.
An amazing, pleasantly non-annoying, professional app that has given me no problems in the five years I have used it after updates. Has in-app purchases for many more dictionaries. What a wonderful work by its programmers! I've been disappointed by other language apps, but not this one, standing tall among them. I wish there was a way to search example sentences, but it's not a real complaint. Recommended.
This is one of the most well-made apps on the planet. It recognizes Chinese handwriting from my left thumb, and I'm a right handed first-year Chinese student. It has definitions and examples for everything. It has pronunciation for everything. It does OCR. The free version is probably good enough for anyone living who isn't living in China. The app links with the rest of Android, allowing you to instantly translate text from photos, text you've selected, or basically anything else. It's perfect.
I would absolutely love to give this app 5 stars. It is hands down the best chinese to english dictionary app. However, there is one problem with the app. The problem: When attempting to speak into the app, it often correctly displays the spoken words, but if it picks up any noise whatsoever it will refuse to search the word until it no longer pick up any noise. My recommendation: add a button to submit the voice search. Please add this. The microphone feature is nearly unusable otherwise.
By far the best tool for Chinese out there. Amazing live OCR with the camera for words and characters or for pages that are on your device already. Dictionary support is great. Can choose to copy the text and save it later for notes. Audio text to speech support with different voices. Can chose from different dictionaries. I've been using this for just over a year now and I never stop being impressed by how fast and accurate it is. This app has changed my life. Thank you for creating it.
The Dictionaries are good. Pleco is an institution in this field. However, menus and options are often complicated to find, the OCR isn't so good, pretty inaccurate in many cases, making it a waste of time compared to the same function on Google translate. It lacks a widget for studying f loo flashcards on the go and a way to quickly train words once looks up or flashcards one is training with. Too many clicks to do things one needs to do quick and often on the go
An absolute must have. I'm currently in Mainland China and this app is indispensable, constantly running in the background, and reflects much of my screen usage during the day. It is extremely customisable, and though it is inundated with options I asked two times via email how to tweak a certain function and got a reply within hours. The default option layout nevertheless turns out to be relatively perfect for the average user. I recommend the OCR add-on, it is accurate and permits editing!
The greatest app. I can spend hours just browsing it. The breakdown of each character is so convenient and can lead one into veritable Pleco holes from which the only escape is the learning of new words. I've had a great deal of fun working on some of these new ebooks they've added, the graded readers. Most of them are based on Chinese stories, so they're much more aligned with the whole purpose behind learning the language than those based on Western originals. P.S. Get more ebooks!
***This review contains a suggestion!! ***This is the most essential app for anyone studying Chinese, and has saved my life may times while abroad. Pleco support, can you guys make an option for the clip reader function to show pinyin above the text for the characters or show the tone colors of a character? I find that a lot of times when I am reading, I know the word but I often forget which tone it is, so showing the colors would be extremely useful for me! Thank you for all you guys do!!
Great app, using it to learn Mandarin in Taiwan. Very powerful app, many settings, just need a bit time to figure it out. I even put all the characters from school book in single folders an can do test myself in different ways. A little bit expensive, but worth it. Very good dictonary. And if some phrases are missing, you can create your own.
Absolutely necessary for any learner of Mandarin Chinese. Even if you don't spend a dime, this has to be the best dictionary available. Personally, I've purchased the SRS flashcards, and I plan on purchasing the whole basic bundle soon. If you wanted to save a bit of money, you could just use Anki for all your flash cards needs, but the convenience Pleco has is unparalleled. In the middle of a conversation you can hear a word you didn't know, search, and add the flash card in less than 5s.
Incredibly useful if you are learning Mandarin or Cantonese, no matter your skill level. Highly recommended! I cannot stress the amount of times Pleco's helped me with language barriers. Normally I don't buy in-app purchases, but this one incredible app is an exception. Even just free features are plentiful and very useful for a Chinese learner.
Firstly, I went into settings to change to dark them not noticing the icon on top left and found an amazing level of customization, also noticed the color codes 👌, then to see all the context from typing in a word of phrase to translate is mind blowing and so far no adds. My rating could change as I have not fully explored this app but my first impression is that I'm very impressed.
Thank you!! This app helped me to not only remember vocab but to understand the whole morphological system of the language really well. My biggest recent successes were all linked to learning Chinese and I honestly couldn't have done it without you! It has served me well in everything from learning my first HSK words to reading ancient poetry. The flashcard extension is worth the extra money.
Worth every dollar. The flashcard tests are super cutsomizeable and very helpful. The flashcard database takes some tinkering but once you figure out the search filters, it's a very powerful tool. The dictionary is also great, no complaints. The best thing is, when I noticed a bug with my app, I emailed support and they reached out the same day! Amazing app
The best Chinese dictionary I have ever seen, and so much more than a simple dictionary... Oh my god, this is amazing. So much to do! And so fun! I can draw a character, or type it, or speak it, or use print screen... And from there the fun begins: look up component words, characters, usages within sentences!.. Listen to examples, and learn from the dictionary in ways that resemble an encyclopedia. Also their support is so kind, and helpful.
This is a remarkable app. Really useful for the student of Chinese. Search can be entered in English, pinyin, or character. Stroke-order help for many characters. Word combinations for the character searched. Sentence examples with pop-up windows for each sentence component. Lots of other features I haven't explored yet
If you want to learn Chinese effectively, you must use Pleco. Once you bought its expert bundle and its outlier etymology dictionary, you can fully understand Chinese and have the flashcard system to learn a little bit every day while being sure not to forget anything. Definitely worth the investment. I feel like instead of learning Chinese for 10 years, I'll be very good in just 5.