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

Incredibly useful dictionary for learners even without any of the paid add-ons. Comprehensive dictionary containing character definitions, uses in various parts of speech, stroke orders (for basic characters in free version), and component characters. Paid add-ons aren't cheap *but* are notably *one-time* lifetime purchases rather than another subscription to deal with. Compared to prices for comparable physical media, it's pretty good and I'll probably pay for some of them.

Pleco is alone in its class for excellence and they offer many add-on features, dictionaries, and it has a good flash card system. I highly recommend it. That being said, often I find some compound words/phrases missing, but Google Translate can fill in those gaps easily. It would be nice to be able to recommend new words and phrases back to them based on experiences with native speakers (I live in China).

This is such a great dictionary. Especially the feature that allows you to draw the character. After you use it for a while and if you find that you like it, I recommend springing for the Basic Bundle, which gives you stroke order for all characters, not just some, plus better pronunciation audios, plus the optical character reader, and a lot more.

What’s new

This update is mostly about fixes for annoying / hard-to-fix bugs, heavily centered around screen reader / OCR - which should work better in fullscreen mode, for example - but touching on lots of other areas too. If there's any long-running bug in our Android app you're aware of that hasn't been fixed in this update (whether or not you've written about it before) please let us know.