Every gloss popover in the annotated poems comes from one of the dictionaries below. They disagree with each other constantly, which is the point — but each one has its own notation, and several of them bury the definition behind a wall of encoding codes. This page explains what you are looking at, one dictionary at a time.
Japanese-language sources are ranked first, because the point of these annotations is to read literary Chinese through Japanese. A Japanese explanation you can actually read beats a more accurate Chinese one you cannot. The Chinese dictionaries follow as a deliberate second tier.
现代汉语规范词典 [春风] means the traditional 春風 missed
and the simplified 春风 hit.
Not a macOS dictionary. The free Japanese–English dictionary project (formerly EDICT), maintained by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group. This is the same database that powers most Japanese learning software.
Every reading and every sense, with all glosses. A spelling with several unrelated entries shows each one separately, split by a blank line — 草 has three, 一 has six.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
くさ・そう | All readings for that entry, separated by ・. |
(n, arch) | Part-of-speech and usage tags. See below. |
; | Separates glosses within one sense — these are alternative English wordings of the same meaning, not different meanings. |
— … | An editorial note on the sense. |
Watch for the arch and obs tags — archaic and obsolete.
Those mark the senses that have since dropped out of Japanese, which are frequently the ones that
still apply in a Tang poem. 草 sense 2, "ninja," is tagged arch; sense 5 is internet
slang from the last decade. JMdict describes the whole history of the word without ordering it
chronologically, so the tags are how you tell which end you are at.
Common tags: n noun, v1/v5 verb classes,
adj-i/adj-na adjective classes, ctr counter,
pref/suf prefix/suffix, exp expression,
num numeral, abbr abbreviation, sl slang.
JMdict is also the only source that can give a whole multi-character word a real Japanese reading — that is where はるかぜ for 春風 comes from, as opposed to a mechanical character-by-character reading.
Sanseidō's (三省堂) large single-volume Japanese dictionary, and the dictionary macOS licenses for Japanese. Monolingual: it explains Japanese words in Japanese. This is the workhorse of these annotations, and the source most likely to surprise you.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
りり | The reading, in hiragana, always first. |
1 | Pitch accent: which mora carries the drop. 0 means flat (heiban). |
【離離】 | The word in kanji. |
（トタル） | Part of speech. Here: a ―たる/―と adjectival, the classical pattern for descriptive binomes. |
文形動タリ | Classical (文語) tari-adjectival — a marker that this word belongs to literary language, not modern speech. |
①②③ | Numbered senses. |
「…」 | A citation. The ― dash inside stands in for the headword. |
〈滝口入道•樗牛〉 | Source of the citation: work • author. |
〈子項目〉 | Sub-entries: compounds built on this word, listed at the end. |
Why 大辞林 is the interesting one. It carries a deep stock of Sino-Japanese vocabulary that Japanese borrowed or coined from literary Chinese, including words no Chinese dictionary lists. 【原上】 "野原の上" is a real entry here, cited from a Meiji-era novel, while in Chinese 原上 is not a word at all — just 原 plus a locative 上. Yet that entry lands on exactly the right reading of 離離原上草. Japanese fossilized a transparent Chinese phrase into a noun, and the fossil turns out to be a good parsing hint for the original.
The flip side: a 大辞林 hit tells you what a Japanese reader made of these characters, possibly a thousand years after the poem. Compare it against the Chinese entries rather than trusting it.
Sanseidō's Chinese–Japanese dictionary (bundled with its reverse, クラウン日中辞典). This one is the bridge: a Chinese dictionary that answers in Japanese. It is ranked with the Japanese sources for that reason. Its headwords are simplified, so it is the main beneficiary of the automatic traditional→simplified retry.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
shān | Pinyin. |
部首 / 部首内画数 / 総画数 | Radical, strokes beyond the radical, total strokes. Skip unless you are looking the character up on paper. |
四角号碼 | Four-Corner code — see notation. Ignorable. |
種別 常用 | Frequency band: 常用 is the common tier. |
1名詞 2語素 | Numbered senses, each tagged with its part of speech in Japanese. 語素（形態素） means the character is a bound morpheme here, not a free word. |
〔量詞 座〕 | The counter this noun takes — directly comparable to Japanese 助数詞. |
▸ | An example: Chinese, pinyin, then the Japanese translation. |
(繁離) | On a simplified headword, the traditional form in parentheses. |
Because it glosses modern Mandarin, a Crown entry describes how the word works in the living language, not in Tang poetry. It is at its best for showing you that a character you know as a Japanese noun is a preposition or a verb in Chinese.
Not a macOS dictionary. The kanjidic2 character database, again from the EDRDG. Every
popover carries one of these blocks per character of the word — labelled kanjidic 枯,
kanjidic 榮, and so on, deduplicated for a doubled word like 離離 — after the Japanese
word dictionaries and before the Chinese ones. A character gloss is not a word definition, so it
never outranks a real entry; but when only a Chinese dictionary knows the word, it is the only
Japanese footing you have.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
音 | On'yomi: the Sino-Japanese readings, borrowed from Chinese. These are the ones to compare against the pinyin and the Cantonese. |
訓 | Kun'yomi: native Japanese readings. A trailing or leading hyphen (くさ-, -ぐさ) marks a form used only in compounds. |
grade | The school year the character is taught in Japan: 1–6 are the kyōiku kanji, 8 is the rest of the jōyō set. A rough proxy for how basic it is. |
JLPT | Converted from the old four-level scale kanjidic2 records, so treat it as approximate. |
A character with no kanjidic entry is usually a traditional form that Japanese does not use: 歲
is absent because Japanese writes 歳, which is why that character's outer ruby shows ?.
It ranks last because a character gloss is not a word definition. But it does one irreplaceable job: when JMdict has no entry for a run, the outer ruby reading is built by concatenating each character's first on'yomi from kanjidic. That is where リリ for 離離 and セイセイ for 萋萋 come from — not real Japanese words, but the reading a Japanese reader would reach for when sounding out an unfamiliar compound.
Note that this depends on JMdict specifically, not on the other dictionaries. 離離 gets the mechanical reading リリ even though the 大辞林 entry directly below it in the popover opens with the real reading りり, because JMdict does not have the word. The outer ruby is a best guess; the popover is the authority.
A Taiwanese monolingual Chinese dictionary from the 五南 publishing house. The best classical coverage of anything here, and the one that will most often have an entry when everything else is silent. Traditional characters, definitions in Chinese.
The opening looks like line noise until you know the pattern. It is three things run together:
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
離ㄌㄧˊ離ㄌㄧˊ | The headword with bopomofo interleaved after each character. |
ㄌㄧˊ ㄌㄧˊ | The same reading again, this time as a continuous string. |
| lí lí | | Pinyin, between pipes. |
卜月人土 卜月人土 | Cangjie input codes, one group per character. Pure typing metadata — skip these. |
名詞 動詞 形容詞 副詞 | Part-of-speech headers; senses are grouped under them. |
①②③ | Numbered senses. |
例 | Marks an example or citation. |
（詩．王風．黍離） | Citation source, dot-separated: Shijing · Wang Feng · Shu Li. |
同義詞 / 反義詞 | Synonyms / antonyms. |
孳乳字 | Characters derived from this one as a phonetic element. |
Long entries end with a run-on list of every compound beginning with the character. That is an index, not part of the definition.
Its citations are the reason to read it: 五南 quotes the Shijing, Xunzi, the Chuci, and the 晉書, which is exactly the register Tang poets were writing in.
A Chinese–English bidirectional dictionary. Traditional headwords, terse English.
Same opening pattern as 五南 — headword with bopomofo interleaved, reading repeated, pinyin between pipes — and then, mercifully, plain English. No senses, no citations, usually one line. When you want to know what a word means and do not want to read a Chinese paragraph to find out, this is the one to look at first.
A Hong Kong dictionary from the Commercial Press (商務印書館). Traditional characters, definitions in Chinese, and one feature no other dictionary here offers: Cantonese readings.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| shān | | Mandarin pinyin. |
粵拼 saan1 | Jyutping, the standard Cantonese romanization. The number is the tone (1–6). |
珊 | A homophone character, the traditional way of indicating a reading. |
①② and | | Senses, with | separating example compounds within a sense. |
（离） | The simplified form of a traditional headword. |
The Cantonese readings are worth more than they look for reading Tang poetry: Cantonese preserves the final consonants (-p, -t, -k) and tone categories of Middle Chinese far better than Mandarin does, which is why poems that no longer rhyme in Mandarin often still rhyme in Cantonese. Japanese on'yomi preserve those same finals — Japanese -ku/-ki and -tsu/-chi endings are borrowings of the very same -k and -t. If a rhyme looks broken, compare the Jyutping against the on'yomi.
A mainland prescriptive dictionary of modern standard Chinese. Simplified characters, definitions in Chinese.
Each sense opens with a part-of-speech tag: 名 noun, 动 verb,
形 adjective, 副 adverb, 数 numeral, 量
measure word. 〈文〉 marks a literary or classical usage. Examples follow the
definition, separated by |.
Being a dictionary of the modern language, it is the least useful here for poetry — and the most useful for seeing how far a word has travelled since the Tang. Its headwords are simplified, so it only answers after the traditional→simplified retry.
A dictionary of 成語 (chéngyǔ) — the four-character set phrases, almost all of which are compressed quotations from classical literature. Simplified headwords, definitions in Chinese.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
▸ 《…》 | The locus classicus — the original text the phrase compresses, oldest first. |
例子 | A modern example sentence. |
同义 / 反义 | Synonymous / antonymous idioms. |
This is the dictionary that explains why a phrase means what it means. Since the whole genre consists of quotations from the classics, its citations often predate the poem you are reading.
The same genre with English on the facing page, in traditional characters.
It gives a literal rendering first — marked (literal) — and then a
bullet list of English proverbs that occupy the same idiomatic space. 源 marks the
source text. The literal line is the useful one when you are trying to see the image the Chinese is
actually building; the English proverbs are substitutions, not translations.
The Oxford Chinese–English dictionary. Simplified headwords, English definitions, and by far the most structured entries of the Chinese sources.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
noun | Part of speech, in English. |
［Geology］ | Subject field label. |
（小山） | A Chinese disambiguating gloss, telling you which shade of meaning the English translation covers. |
▸ | Example phrase with translation. |
→ | Cross-references to compounds containing this character. |
The most readable Chinese source if your Chinese is limited, since the definitions themselves are English. Like 现代汉语规范词典 it describes the modern language.
Taiwan's phonetic alphabet, used instead of pinyin: ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (b, p, m, f) gives it
the nickname. Tones are marked with a following mark — ˊ second tone, ˇ
third, ˋ fourth, ˙ neutral; first tone is unmarked. So ㄌㄧˊ
is lí. Both the Taiwanese dictionaries here (五南, 譯典通) print bopomofo interleaved into
the headword before giving pinyin, which is why their entries open with what looks like a jumble.
Strings like 卜月人土 are a keyboard input method: the sequence of keys you
press to type that character, where each key is labelled with a mnemonic character. They carry no
linguistic information whatsoever. Skip them.
A five-digit code (22770) that encodes the shape of the four corners of a character,
used for ordering paper dictionaries. Also skip.
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
①②③ | Numbered senses. Universal across all of these dictionaries. |
例 / 例子 | Example or citation follows (Chinese dictionaries). |
▸ | Example follows (Crown, Oxford, 成語). |
「…」 | A quotation (Japanese dictionaries). |
〈…〉 | Source of a quotation (Japanese dictionaries). |
《…》 | Title of a work (Chinese dictionaries). |
― | Stands in for the headword inside a quotation (Japanese dictionaries). |
| | Separates examples within one sense (Chinese dictionaries). |
同義詞 / 同义 / 反義詞 / 反义 | Synonyms / antonyms. |
A blank where you expected an entry is usually one of three things. The dictionary covers the modern language and the word is classical (春風 is in 五南 and 大辞林 but 原上 is in neither of the mainland dictionaries). Or the word is a two-syllable literary binome — 離離, 萋萋 — whose meaning belongs to the compound and cannot be reached from either character alone; Wiktionary and CC-CEDICT both thin out badly here, which is why these macOS dictionaries are worth the trouble. Or the run simply is not a word, which is the lookup working correctly: 原上草 returns nothing from all 87 dictionaries on the system, because it is 原上 plus 草.