Open Source Licenses & Attribution

ThePureLanguage is built on open source software and openly licensed data. This page collects the attribution and license notices those works require, in one place. It is a licensing page, not a privacy disclosure — for what data your browser sends to third parties, see our Privacy Policy, in particular Section 6 (Content Delivery Networks) and Section 19 (Analytics).

Every component listed here is used under a license that permits commercial use, including use on an advertising-supported website.

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1. Chinese Character Stroke Data

The stroke-order animations on our Stroke Order Animator, dictionary word pages, radical pages, symbol pages, beginner games, certain articles and the stroke-order lesson video are drawn from character data published by the Make Me a Hanzi project. Our handwriting lookup and component character finder are built on the same data: the stroke-signature index one matches your drawing against, and the component index the other searches, are both derived from these medians, and the notice naming this source travels inside each index file itself.

That data was derived from the Arphic PL KaitiM GB and Arphic PL UKai fonts, released by Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. under the Arphic Public License. We serve this data from our own servers, which makes us a redistributor of it, so the full license text is published alongside the data itself:

• Arphic Public License — full text as distributed with the data
• The same license in the Make Me a Hanzi repository

Make Me a Hanzi also publishes a character dictionary under the GNU Lesser General Public License, derived from Unihan and CJKlib. We do not use that dictionary — our definitions and pinyin come from our own dictionaries, with CC-CEDICT filling gaps in the HSK word lists (section 5) — so only the Arphic Public License applies here.

2. Software Libraries

HanziWriter, Bootstrap, jQuery, jQuery Validation, jQuery Unobtrusive Validation and Font Awesome are served from our own server, not from a content delivery network, so we redistribute them. Each licence file is published beside the copy we serve: HanziWriter 3.7.3, Bootstrap 5.3.8, jQuery 3.7.1, jQuery Validation 1.22.1, jQuery Unobtrusive Validation 4.0.0 and Font Awesome Free 7.3.1.

PDFsharp (Copyright © 2001–2026 empira Software GmbH) writes our free downloadable HSK word-list PDFs and the free PDF packs. It is released under the MIT License, which permits commercial use with no revenue threshold; its copyright and permission notice are published with our application. The link-preview share images are drawn by our own code, from the same embedded font, and use no third-party graphics library.

NUglify reduces the size of our JavaScript during publication. Its licence permits commercial use; its copyright and licence notices are retained with our build tools. Its assembly is not part of the software sent to your browser. Minifying a script does not change the licences of any third-party material it contains.

3. Fonts

The HSK word-list PDFs, the free PDF packs and the link-preview share images embed a subset of Noto Sans SC, published by Google under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. A generated PDF has to carry its own Chinese glyphs — one that merely references a font it does not embed shows empty boxes in most readers — so a reduced copy of the Regular weight ships inside each file. Our copy is modified — instanced to a single weight and subset to the characters those documents use — so it is renamed to Noto Sans SC HSK to keep it distinguishable from the upstream font and clear of the license's Reserved Font Name. Everywhere else on the site, text is drawn with the fonts already installed on your own device.

4. Icons

Interface icons come from Font Awesome Free by Fonticons, Inc. Font Awesome Free is released under three licenses, each covering a different part of the package:

• Icons — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which requires the attribution given here.
• Fonts — SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Code — MIT License.

The full terms are published at fontawesome.com/license/free, and the licence text distributed with the version we serve is at /lib/font-awesome/7.3.1/LICENSE.txt.

5. Reference Data

HSK vocabulary lists follow the official syllabuses published by the Chinese Ministry of Education and its testing bodies. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or accredited under any of those organisations. Country IP range data used for traffic filtering is sourced from ipdeny.com.

The English definitions attached to the words of the official HSK lists come from two sources. Most are from ThePureLanguage's own dictionary, which is our own work and is not openly licensed. Where our dictionary has no entry for a word's reading, the definition is adapted from CC-CEDICT, the community-maintained Chinese-English dictionary published by MDBG and its contributors, which is based on CEDICT, © 1997, 1998 Paul Andrew Denisowski. Those definitions are used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0), and they are marked † wherever a definition is shown as part of a list or a file: our HSK level word lists and the PDFs generated from them, the HSK flashcards and the printable flashcard sheets, the Chinese Word of the Day and our RSS feed, today's practice, the Teacher Zone worksheets, the HSK 1–3 workbook, and any word you save to your own review deck — including the Anki, spreadsheet and backup files you export from it, each of which repeats this credit inside the file. The same definitions also appear, unmarked, in the games, quizzes and practice tests built on those lists and in the site search; the word-of-the-day share image names its source on the image itself.

The license permits commercial use and requires that adaptations carry the same terms, so those definitions marked † are themselves offered to you under CC BY-SA 4.0, wherever on this site they appear. Our copyright notices, our Terms of Use and our "all rights reserved" line do not restrict them: you have every right the license gives you. Every downloadable file and printout that carries them repeats this credit inside the file.

That covers the marked definitions and nothing else. Unmarked definitions, pinyin and the rest of these pages are ours. CC-CEDICT is a dictionary of headwords, readings and glosses and contains no example sentences, so the example sentences printed beside some words are not adapted from it and are not offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The same boundary applies inside the HSK 1–3 workbook: its practice pages, writing grids and the character readings resolved from our own dictionary were never CC-CEDICT's, and the file says so in its own notice. The other three packs — the character practice pack, radicals poster and travel phrasebook — contain no CC-CEDICT material at all and are our own work. The official HSK word list itself — which words belong to which level — is factual data from the published syllabus.

Nothing else on the site is covered by it. Our translator, dictionary word pages, pinyin tools and written articles are built on our own dictionaries and our own writing, and are not CC-licensed.

6. Corrections

If you believe a work is used here without its required attribution, or is attributed incorrectly, please tell us via our contact page and we will correct it.