Every once in a while I want to look up a truly obscure Chinese character, or one whose very existence I'm not even sure of (e.g. the right-hand half of #254, 塔, aka pagoda). Is there a free online encyclopedic reference for Chinese characters? I'm looking for a collection that does not limit itself to characters in current use, but includes also obsolete, or archaic, or unorthodox, or otherwise obscure ones.

~K

P.S. I imagine that such reference, if it exists, would be centered around Chinese rather than Japanese, but this just a guess, based solely on the fact that literacy in Chinese requires knowing more characters than it does in Japanese. But it would not be shocking if the most comprehensive such reference were, in fact, not Chinese.

Pablo

http://download.cnet.com/Pablo/3000-2279...46408.html

is the only chinese E-dict I know of. It's okay, but remember it's an E-dict.

Sorry for going a bit off topic here, but over the past few days I have begun to see posts on various language forums with "ISO" in the title.
I doubt it means "International Standards Organization" in this sense, so would you mind clearing up its meaning for me? As I haven't seen this before.

In search of, I believe.

Ah, now that would make sense

Oh, I thought this was related to some ISO standard for Chinese characters. Silly me v____v

gfb345 Wrote:Every once in a while I want to look up a truly obscure Chinese character, or one whose very existence I'm not even sure of (e.g. the right-hand half of #254, 塔, aka pagoda). Is there a free online encyclopedic reference for Chinese characters? I'm looking for a collection that does not limit itself to characters in current use, but includes also obsolete, or archaic, or unorthodox, or otherwise obscure ones.

What sort of information about such characters would you be looking for?

I don't think you're going to find anything online because with few exceptions, anything computerized is going to be limited to the JIS1 and 2 specifications (which is around 6500 characters). If you want to go beyond that, there's not much choice but paper dictionaries.

The most complete online resource I've seen is the Unihan database http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html, which contains all the characters representable in Unicode.

Codexus Wrote:Oh, I thought this was related to some ISO standard for Chinese characters. Silly me v____v

Don't worry, I did too.
But usually I feel too stupid to ask, so thanks to Zarxrax for going out there and asking what other people might feel is obvious.

Zarxrax Wrote:Sorry for going a bit off topic here, but over the past few days I have begun to see posts on various language forums with "ISO" in the title.
I doubt it means "International Standards Organization" in this sense, so would you mind clearing up its meaning for me? As I haven't seen this before.

I didn't know what it was either. I didn't reply 'cause I thought it might be some technical term that outruled any online dictionaries I was going to suggest.

These are the sites I use. I don't know if they suit you needs, though.
http://www.nciku.com/
http://www.cojak.org/index.php?function=about
http://www.zhongwen.com/

zhongwen gives this http://zhongwen.com/d/211/x175.htm for the hanzi used in 塔.

I like using nciku (mentioned by yukamina) because it lets you hand-write the character you're looking for.

Thank you all. Those are amazingly useful resources.