Where the data comes from
This site is assembled from established, openly published Chinese-language datasets. This page explains those sources, what makes a character or word appear, and how everything is ranked.
What's in the database
Two tables sit at the core — characters and words. Each one earns its page by appearing in at least one trusted list. Nothing is invented to fill gaps.
Taiwan's standard common-character list — the Ministry of Education's 常用國字標準字體表 (4,808 traditional-script characters) — plus 166 characters that aren't on that list but appear inside words we carry, so no word is left with a component character you can't click through to. Both kinds rank together by real frequency rather than the extras tailing out at the end.
Every word in Taiwan's official TOCFL vocabulary (華語八千詞), plus the most frequent multi-character words from the COCT traditional-script corpus. A word appears if it's a TOCFL word or common enough in the COCT corpus.
Where each piece comes from
Each kind of information has its own source.
- Frequency ranks
- Taiwan frequency from the COCT 通用詞頻表, a traditional-script corpus from Taiwan's National Academy for Educational Research (國教院). Word frequencies are tallied down to the characters that make them up.
- Character facts
- Unihan, the Unicode database: stroke count and Kangxi radical.
- Readings
- Taiwan-standard pinyin and bopomofo from Moedict (萌典), the digital edition of the Ministry of Education's dictionary — the only pronunciation source used here, so no Mainland reading can leak in. Where a character has several readings, the one shown first is whichever the COCT corpus attests most often.
- English definitions
- Written by a language model, not taken from a dictionary. Each gloss is generated from that entry's Unihan definition and its Moedict zh-TW definition, so it paraphrases sourced material into learner-facing English rather than inventing a meaning. They are the one field on this site that is not a citation, and — like any generated text — they can be subtly off. Everything else on the page is looked up.
- Proficiency
- TOCFL (華語八千詞) levels — Taiwan's official 8,000-word graded vocabulary, from the official list published by the Ministry of Education.
How we rank
Ranks reflect real usage frequency — how often a character or word actually appears in a large body of text — not stroke order, teaching order, or any official notion of importance.
Taiwan's ranks come from a Taiwan-native corpus. Word frequencies from COCT are tallied down to the characters that make them up; they're never translated or borrowed from other regional data.