Draw a Chinese character to look it up

Handwriting and component lookup are the two features most Chinese dictionary sites put behind a sign-in once you get past the commonest thousand characters — which is exactly the point at which you start meeting characters you cannot type. There is no account on this site to sign in to, and no tier above the one you are using. All 3,616 characters are searchable on every visit.

Nothing about your drawing leaves this page either. The comparison is arithmetic running in your browser against a file of stroke patterns it downloads once; there is no optical character recognition service, no image upload and no record of what you looked up. That is the same rule this site follows for stroke-order animations, whose character data is served from here rather than from a third-party CDN so that no one else learns which characters you are studying.

The matcher reduces each stroke to where it starts, where it ends and the path between them, then compares your strokes with the strokes of every character it knows. Four things follow from that, and they are worth knowing because they are not what people expect:

• Neatness barely matters. A wobbly stroke in the right place beats a beautiful one in the wrong place. Do not slow down to make it look good.
• Stroke count matters most. It is the first thing compared, so a character drawn with the right number of strokes is already most of the way to the top of the list. Two strokes joined into one is the commonest reason a character does not appear — if you cannot see yours, try splitting or separating a stroke.
• Stroke order helps but is not required. Correct order scores best. A character drawn in any order is still found, with a small penalty — you are allowed not to know the order yet, and the animation on each match will teach it.
• You do not have to finish. Matches update after every stroke, and four or five strokes of a twelve-stroke character often narrow it to a handful.

If nothing looks right, clear the square and draw it again slightly larger, filling the box. Proportion is compared, so a character squeezed into one corner looks different from the same character drawn full size.

Handwriting is the fastest route when you have the character in front of you and nothing else. It is not the only one, and the others are better in different corners:

Your phone's own keyboard has a handwriting mode too, and it is worth turning on — see the typing guide above. It writes the character into any app; this page tells you what the character means, which is the part a keyboard cannot do.

Does stroke order matter?

It helps and it is not required. Drawing a character in its proper order gives the sharpest match, because the order is part of what is compared; drawing it in any other order still finds it, with a small penalty. That tolerance is deliberate — the person looking a character up is often the person who has not learned its order yet, and every match on this page comes with an animation that shows it.

Is my handwriting uploaded?

No. The recognition is arithmetic running inside your browser against a file of stroke patterns it downloads once. Nothing is sent anywhere, no OCR service is involved, and nothing is stored — see the privacy policy for what this site does and does not collect.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes, and it is better with a finger than with a mouse. Drawing with a trackpad is the hardest way to use it; if the matches look wrong on a laptop, that is usually why.

Why is my character not in the list?

Almost always the stroke count. Two strokes drawn as one, or one stroke lifted in the middle and drawn as two, moves the character out of range — the list is limited to characters within a couple of strokes of what you drew. Redraw it watching where each stroke starts and stops. Failing that, the character may be outside the 3,616 indexed here; the Pinyin Annotator will read any character you can copy and paste.

Simplified or traditional?

Both are indexed. Draw what you see. A traditional character opens the entry for its simplified counterpart, which shows both forms; the Simplified ↔ Traditional converter handles whole passages.

• Chinese Dictionary — the full entry behind every match: senses, words built on the character, audio and examples
• Stroke Order Animator — watch any character written stroke by stroke, at your own speed
• Radicals Hub — 101 components, each with the characters built from it
• Pinyin Annotator — pinyin above every character of a passage you can paste
• Simplified ↔ Traditional Converter — the same text in the other script
• How to Type Chinese Characters — pinyin input, handwriting pads and what to install
• 田字格 Practice Sheets — printable grids for writing the character out by hand