This app is built on the generous work of others. Each source is listed with what it provides here and the terms it is shared under.
Writing & stroke order
Hanzi Writer v3.7.3 — © 2014 David Chanin. MIT License.
Draws the characters and animates stroke order.
github.com/chanind/hanzi-writer
Show the licence
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2014 David Chanin
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Stroke data — from
hanzi-writer-data 2.0.1, which comes from the
Make Me a Hanzi project, derived from the fonts AR PL KaitiM GB and AR PL UKai. Copyright © 1999 Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. Arphic Public License.
The shapes and stroke order of every character. In September 2026 this app combined the characters it uses into a single file, strokes.json, and left out the markers that flag each radical’s strokes; the shapes and stroke paths are exactly as published. You may redistribute it under the same licence.
Arphic Public License (full text)
Characters & words
Character information — from the
Make Me a Hanzi dictionary data, itself derived from Unicode’s Unihan database and CJKlib. GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 or later.
Components, radicals, character meanings, which part of a character gives its meaning or its sound, and the etymology hints on each card. A trimmed copy for the characters in HSK 1–4 is inside the app; the rest, reformatted, is in chars.json, which is shared under the same licences.
GNU LGPL v3 (full text)
CC-CEDICT Chinese–English dictionary — maintained by
MDBG, continuing the CEDICT project begun by Paul Denisowski. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
Meanings for words you add yourself, and the starting point for many HSK meanings. This app includes a selection of entries, reformatted, in dict.json, and character meanings in chars.json; both are shared under the same licence.
CC BY-SA 4.0
HSK word lists —
hsk-vocabulary by clem109 (MIT License; data from gigacool/hanyu-shuiping-kaoshi) and
complete-hsk-vocabulary by Yanis Zafirópulos (MIT License).
Which words belong to each HSK 2.0 level. Levels, meanings and pinyin were then checked and corrected by hand.
SUBTLEX-CH word frequencies — Cai, Q. & Brysbaert, M. (2010),
SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles, PLoS ONE 5(6): e10729.
Used to choose which dictionary entries are common enough to include.
MyMemory by Translated —
mymemory.translated.net
The online lookup for words that aren’t in the dictionary: the lookup button when you create a word, and when a shared English word has no exact match. It needs a connection, and can be turned off in Settings (“Look up meanings online”).