Data & licences

Hanzily: Learn Chinese & HSK · Effective October 18, 2026

Hanzily works offline with open data. Thank you to the communities that make it possible.

Dictionary: CC-CEDICT

Hanzily's dictionary is based on CC-CEDICT, a community-maintained Chinese-English dictionary published by MDBG, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. CC-CEDICT is based on CEDICT, Copyright © 1997-1998 Paul Andrew Denisowski. Original source: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=cc-cedict.

The dictionary database used by Hanzily was modified from the original and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes we made:

the data was converted to an SQLite database (with a full-text search index);
pinyin with tone marks, Zhuyin and search forms were added;
measure words and idioms (chengyu) were separated into their own tables;
entries were linked to HSK levels, character data and example sentences from the sources below.

Download

Download hanzily_content.db.gz

A gzip-compressed SQLite database (decompress with gunzip). It contains the converted dictionary and the other data listed below, licensed as described on this page. Licence texts: CC-CEDICT header, sources summary, CC BY-SA 4.0 legal code.

Translated meanings (gloss packs)

Meanings in other languages are translations of the CC-CEDICT definitions made by Hanzily (Spanish with an AI model; 66 other languages with Google Translate, machine translation). They may contain mistakes and are shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Download hanzily_gloss_packs.tar.gz

A gzip-compressed tar of one file per language (glosspacks/<lang>.glosspack, each a gzip-compressed tab-separated text file: entry id, position, text).

Credits and other sources

Character data: Unihan

Character decompositions: Make Me a Hanzi

Decompositions, etymology hints and definitions from Make Me a Hanzi by Shaunak Kishore, derived from Unihan and CJKlib, LGPL-3.0-or-later. Licence text.

Stroke order

Stroke outlines from Make Me a Hanzi, derived from Arphic PL KaitiM GB and Arphic PL UKai fonts, Copyright © Arphic Technology Co., Ltd., under the Arphic Public License. The stroke data is kept as a separate file and is not modified. Licence text.

Example sentences: Tatoeba

Example sentences from the Tatoeba Project, licensed under CC BY 2.0 FR or CC0. Each sentence names its contributor where it is shown. Hanzily adds pinyin and word segmentation.

Word levels: HSK lists

HSK word-level lists compiled by Yanis Zafiropulos (complete-hsk-vocabulary, MIT licence). These are community lists for practice and are not official HSK materials. Licence text.

Radicals

Kangxi radical numbers, strokes, readings and meanings were compiled for Hanzily from public facts.

Notes

Pinyin, Zhuyin, Jyutping, word segmentation and sentence pinyin shown in the app are generated by Hanzily from the sources above and may contain mistakes. Practice exams, grammar notes, stories, dialogues and other lesson texts are original to Hanzily. Machine-translated meanings are labelled in the app.