The Chinese Lexical Database (CLD) is a comprehensive monolingual lexical database of Chinese consisting the Simplified Chinese Lexical Database (CLD-SC) and the Traditional Chinese Lexical Database (CLD-TC) modules.

Each module contains about 250,000 entries covering general vocabulary and important technical terms. In addition, approximately one million proper nouns and some 250,000 technical terms are also available (see chincome.htm and cjeterm.htm).

Developed by our team of experienced Chinese editors and linguists over many years, the CLD is a significant contribution to the field of Chinese lexicography. CLD is especially suitable for natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as:

1. segmentation for machine translation (MT)
2. information retrieval (IR)
3. morphological analysis (MA) including tokenization/segmentation and POS tagging
4. input method editors (IME)
5. named entity recognition (NER)

Each entry is accompanied by various attributes, such as:

1. phonological information, such as pinyin zhuyin fuhao -- IPA and others also possible
2. grammatical information such as part-of-speech codes
3. semantic classification codes such as type of proper noun
4. morphological information such as derivational affixes and binding valency codes.

To derive full benefit of the CLD, it should be used in conjunction with our comprehensive databases for proper nouns, especially personal and place names, described at chinname.htm.

The Simplified Chinese in the CLD-SC is not merely a code-conversion equivalent of the Traditional Chinese version (CLD-TC). It has been carefully proofread to ensure accuracy both on the orthographic and the lexemic levels (similar to American 'color' vs. British 'colour' as opposed to American 'gas' vs. British 'petrol'). For example, 'laser' in SC is 激光 jīguāng but in TC it is 雷射 léishè (see The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion).

A unique feature of our editorial policy is that the readings data (pinyin and zhuyin) take into account the differences in pronunciation between Taiwan and the PRC. Thus whereas 期待 'to expect' is qīdài in the SC database, it is qídài in the TC database, which corresponds to how this word is pronounced in the PRC and Taiwan respectively. For details, see SC and TC Chinese Pinyin Database.

Uniquely identifies each entry based on hanzi, pinyin, POS and TYPE.

Each entry is accompanied by a rich set of part of speech codes and other grammatical and morphological attributes. See chinpos.htm for POS code definitions.

A subclassification that identifies the semantic properties of the headword or gives supplementary information such as grammatical attributes. See cpostype.htm for TYPE code definitions.

The binding valency codes indicate the degree of binding between a stem/lexeme and an affix, as follows:

0	Free form
1	Always bound
2	Sometimes bound

See also cpostype.htm.

SC lexeme encoded in UTF-8

Pinyin plus tone with hyphen separating syllables. Zhuyin, Wade-Giles, IPA and various other romanization systems also available.

v	"u" plus umlaut, e.g."lv" is "l + u + umlaut"
1-4	tones 1 to 4
0	neutral tone

Rank based on the occurrence of frequency in corpora and lexical sources

A	High frequency ranking
B	Medium frequency ranking
C	Low frequency
D	Rare: SC character not in GB or TC character not in Big Five
X	Single characters rarely used independently or used only in classical Chinese. Only nouns are given.

Relative rank based on occurrence in Chinese web resources. See also chinfreq.htm for information on our detailed statistical data for Chinese.