Pleco Chinese Dictionary

Pleco

In-app purchases

About this app

Pleco is the ultimate Chinese learning companion - an integrated Chinese English dictionary / document reader / flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input and live camera-based character lookups, from a company with 17 years' experience making mobile Chinese learning software.

Major features: ($ = paid add-on)

• Great dictionaries: the free app comes with two dictionaries - CC-CEDICT and our in-house PLC dictionary - which together cover 130,000 Chinese words and include 20,000 example sentences with Pinyin. We offer 8 more free dictionaries as optional downloads, including a 22,000-entry Cantonese-English dictionary, and 19 other great dictionaries are available as paid upgrades. ($)

• Handwriting input: lookup unknown characters by drawing them, with a best-in-class recognition engine. (basic version free, enhanced version $)

• Live Optical Character Recognizer (OCR): look up Chinese words in the dictionary simply by pointing your device's camera at them, or by scrolling around a still image. ($)

• Screen Reader/OCR: instantly tap-lookup Chinese words in other apps through a floating interface; works on Android 4.1 and later. (reader free, OCR $)

• Flashcard System: create a card from any dictionary entry with a single button tap, import premade word lists, use advanced techniques like SRS (spaced repetition), and study in a variety of modes including fill-in-the-blanks and tone drills. (simple version free, full-featured $)

• Audio Pronunciation: instantly hear male + female native-speaker audio for Chinese dictionary headwords; recordings available for over 34,000 words. (stitched-syllable free, multi-syllable $) Or listen to example sentences with text-to-speech (system TTS free, enhanced $).

• Powerful search: look up words by Chinese characters, Pinyin (spaces/tones optional), or a combination, with support for wildcards and full-text search.

• Cross-referencing: tap on any Chinese character / word in any dictionary entry to bring up its definition.

• Stroke Order Diagrams: animations showing you how to draw each Chinese character; 500 in free app, 28,000 in paid add-on.

• Voice Recognition: look up words by speaking them into your device's microphone.

• Document Reader: open a Chinese-language text or PDF file and look up unknown words in the dictionary simply by tapping on them. ($) You can also look up characters on web pages through "Share" and in other documents through the clipboard. (free)

• PRC- and Taiwan-friendly: supports traditional and simplified characters (in dictionary definitions, stroke order, search, OCR, and handwriting), and supports Zhuyin (with ruby support) as well as Pinyin for pronunciation display.

• Cantonese: display headwords + perform searches in Jyutping/Yale romanization. We also offer Cantonese dictionary and Cantonese audio add-ons. (some $)

• No ads: we won't even nag you about buying add-ons.

We also offer excellent customer support - send us an email and see for yourself - and an active user community at plecoforums.com.

We've been making Chinese dictionary apps since 2000, and our sales and customer base have been steadily growing for 17 years across four different platforms. We take good care of our longtime users: people who bought a dictionary on a Palm Pilot in 2001 can still use that dictionary on a new Android phone in 2020 without even paying an upgrade fee.

Paid add-ons can be moved to a new device like any other paid app; just open our free app on your new device and they should reactivate.

If you already own Pleco on another OS, see pleco.com/android for migration options.

This app uses Accessibility services. (for our Screen Reader feature, which helps users to get by in Chinese-speaking regions without knowing Chinese)

Twitter/Facebook: plecosoft

Ratings and reviews

EDIT: See developer's response to fix this issue (thanks for the quick fix and great app!). After the latest update (.96 I think), sending 9 or more characters from a browser by the right click menu (eg in Chrome or Vivaldi) causes Pleco to treat the phrase as a single combination (or at least shows no definitions) rather than as individual words. Workaround is to copy the characters and paste them directly in Pleco rather than using the browser context menu.

I have used this app for years (since 2012/13). I love the voice to text recognition in Chinese (Cantonese). It has flashcards and categories to help you study and organize words. It also can show you stroke order of each character. Definitely best Chinese dictionary and learning app for me. Since I started using it, the app has come with a lot of add-ons (expansions) for different dictionaries. I hope this app continues to improve the quality of the software and functionality.

Edit: I must not have looked at the settings very closely— Pleco interfaces with the AnkiDroid API. I don't know when this feature was added or if it's been there all along, but I'm happy to know it's there. I've been using Pleco for years and have always been impressed by the company's attitude towards customers. Great product, great company!

What's new

.96+.97: bug fixes
.95:
- Updated to new, neural-network paid TTS
- On Android 14 and later, made Screen OCR use Accessibility rather than Media Projection
- Fixed speech recognizer doing English instead of Chinese
- Fixed a bug that flipped paused New OCR images upside-down
- Fixed Screen OCR bar position bugs
- Fixed foldable screen bugs
- Fixed a bug that could cause ebooks to lose place when rotating screen
- Made "Pleco" system selection menu command use reader if length >