Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage

The production of the Web edition of Lin Yutang’s Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage is based on the first edition of the work published in 1972 by the Chinese University Press. The dictionary comprises a total of 8,169 head characters, together with 44,407 explanatory entries of grammatical usage and 40,379 entries of Chinese words or phrases. The web edition of the dictionary database can either be queried in “search mode” (by entering search arguments in the top bar) or it can be accessed in “browse mode” (by navigating through the indices listed in the frame on the left). When using “search mode”, the user can query the dictionary either with “head character search” (首字檢索) or with “full text search” (全文檢索), switchable through radio buttons located on the top bar. Upon choosing one of these two search options, all other related search conditions (Boolean, case, string, order etc.) will be self-adjusted. Besides “head character” and “full text” searches, the web edition also provides the users with three useful “browse mode” operations: “Chinese Radical Index” (漢字部首索引), “Hanyu Pinyin Index” (漢語拼音索引) and the “English Index” (英語索引). These indices are machine-generated tools designed to allow the users to gain multiple accesses to the dictionary database. Users who have difficulties in inputting Chinese directly will find these indices of great heuristic and practical value.

（From the original website.)