To promote language education and set up a language database, the Ministry has compiled several online dictionaries for public use, free of charge.
The dictionaries are reference books aiming to preserve records and the history of the use of words and expressions, rather than for educational purposes.
The dictionaries are briefly described below to allow readers to have a better understanding of them.
The Revised Chinese Dictionary: http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw This dictionary is suitable for teachers and the public. It contains words and expressions from medieval to modern times. Traditional pronunciation is placed alongside modern pronunciation, with references to literature. It provides complete historical materials and has over 167,000 entries.
The Concise Chinese Dictionary: http://dict.concised.moe.edu.tw This dictionary is suitable for primary and junior high school students and beginners. It is a multimedia dictionary complete with sounds and pictures. The characters and words are chosen on the basis of their frequency. It includes over 45,000 characters and words, all explained in plain Chinese.
The Pocket Chinese Dictionary: http://dict.mini.moe.edu.tw/ This dictionary is suitable for primary school students and teachers. Some of the words (sentences) come with exercises and indexes for teaching purposes. It includes over 4,000 words, with some of them complete with illustrations.
The Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants: http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/ This dictionary is virtually a large database with an exhaustive collection of the fonts of Chinese characters. It can be used for language education and research purposes, and as the basis on which Chinese computer code is expanded. The dictionary includes over 100,000 entries.
The Dictionary of Idioms: http://dict.idioms.moe.edu.tw/ This dictionary is suitable for the general public. Each entry contains an idiom, its definition, pronunciation, the original text of the allusion and its vernacular translation, usage, and example sentences. It contains over 1,500 groups of idioms (about 5,000 idioms).
