Chinese Pīnyīn to English Dictionary: Going All-In on Pīnyīn (for Kindle E-Readers)

This Pīnyīn-only to English Dictionary omits Chinese characters entirely. It serves as a highly effective lookup tool for language learners who love reading science fiction, romance novels, podcast transcripts, graded readers, and other texts written fully in Chinese Pinyin on their Kindle e-readers. It includes over 123,500 unique entries, with tone-marked (as well as number marked) Pīnyīn headwords and English glosses, and is designed specifically for the Kindle platform.

Dictionary origin

This dictionary uses the CC-CEDICT project (2025-07-18 release) as data source, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The definitions in this dictionary are human-readable and descriptive, which means there's no explicit tagging of parts of speech (it doesn't say, pron., n., v.p., b.f., trad., pr., etc.). Instead, it uses plain English to suggest grammatical usage. While extensive and well-maintained, the database contains occasional inaccuracies, omissions, and formatting inconsistencies.

As of now, approximately 20,000 Pīnyīn headwords are available written with tone marks. The remaining 100,000+ entries were processed automatically by removing whitespace between syllables, except where capital letters marked proper nouns. As a result, the formatting does not always reflect standard Pīnyīn word boundaries. For example, “cāozuò xìtǒng” (operating system) might be listed as “cāozuòxìtǒng”.

Dictionary entries

Pīnyīn headwords with tone marks appear first, followed by the original tone-numbered entries. Auto-upgraded entries are marked with an asterisk, inviting readers to consider word boundaries — what constitutes a word, and where spaces or hyphens might be appropriate. For example:

āndìng /an1ding4/
■ stable; calm; settled

bù guòyì /bu4 guo4yi4/
■ to be sorry; to feel apologetic

cāozuòxìtǒng /cao1 zuo4 xi4 tong3/*
■ operating system

Peculiarities Of The Kindle Platform

This edition is designed specifically for Kindle, but users should be aware of several technical peculiarities:

• Inaccurate word selection: The Kindle lookup engine selects words based strictly on whitespace boundaries and punctuation, and does not support selections that span multiple words. This might create difficulties with compound expression and long hyphens, and some expressions (such as single syllables or parts of whole words) might not be selectable at all.
• Fuzzy or inaccurate lookup results: Even with fuzzy search disabled, the Kindle lookup engine treats diacritics loosely, often returning multiple entries. This can be helpful, for instance, selecting huìbuhuì may bring up huìbùhuì (written with bù instead of bu). However, in other cases, such as selecting biāndì, the engine may return the selected entry (if available) and a row of unrelated entries with similar base form, but other diacritics, like biǎndī or biàndì. Therefore careful attention is required! Even though this is a technical limitation, it might serve as a useful feature for language learners.
• No ISO language support for Pinyin: Kindle does not officially recognize Chinese Pinyin as a standalone language. Books written in Pinyin need to be registered under languages that have diacritic support — such as Vietnamese or Spanish — to access Latin fonts that handle tone marks and spacing correctly.
• Flashcard integration not fully supported: Since Pinyin is not officially recognized as a language on Kindle, the built-in flashcard tool might be unable to display vocabulary definitions — although example sentences still appear correctly.

On The Nature Of Chinese Word Formation

One of the delights of Mandarin is its flexibility in forming new words, especially through resultative complement structures. These constructions allow verbs to pair freely with complements, creating vivid, often playful expressions. For example:

• kànhuài – to watch (kàn) something until it breaks (huài), suggests “breaking” something just by staring at it.
• shuōsǐ – to talk (shuō) someone to death (sǐ), a humorous exaggeration of endless talking.
• chīqióng – to eat (chī) someone into poverty (qióng) a joking way to describe someone with a very hearty appetite.

While the Kindle platform has some limitations in selecting compound expressions or partial words, this dictionary still provides access to a wide range of vivid and expressive entries. Exploring what can be looked up often leads to unexpected discoveries — and a deeper appreciation of the language’s ingenuity.

A Message From OP

Creating this dictionary turned out to be far more challenging and time-consuming than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I’m very happy to finally share a version that feels truly worth publishing — and one that I believe will support your reading and study efforts.

I wish you all the best — or as they say in Vietnam, Cố gắng! — Try hard!, and in China, Jiāyóu! — Make an extra effort!

Installation

Since March 2025, Amazon has stopped accepting custom-made dictionaries. So I moved out West to Gumroad — a place that feels much friendlier.

To install your purchase, you'll need to sideload the .mobi file onto your Kindle. Below is a list of Kindle devices that likely support sideloading custom dictionaries:

• Kindle Keyboard (3rd Gen)
• Kindle 4 (non-touch)
• Kindle 5 (non-touch, 5th Gen)
• Kindle Touch (4th Gen)
• Kindle Paperwhite 1 (5th Gen)
• Kindle Paperwhite 2 (6th Gen)
• Kindle Paperwhite 3 (7th Gen)
• Kindle Voyage (7th Gen)
• Kindle Oasis 1 (8th Gen)
• Kindle Oasis 2 (9th Gen)
• Kindle Paperwhite 4 (10th Gen)
• Kindle Basic 10th Gen (2019)
• Kindle Paperwhite 5 (11th Gen)

After downloading the dictionary to your computer you need to do the following:

1. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB.
2. Open the Kindle’s file system (it should appear as a USB drive).
3. Copy your .mobi file into the documents folder (not dictionaries, system, or fonts).
4. Safely eject the Kindle.

Finally, the first time you tap on a word written in Pīnyīn, you'll be able to select the dictionary. From then on, your Kindle will do its best to look up words written in Chinese Pīnyīn :)

This dictionary is a work of headaches and love, and it's available here for your convenience (and in appreciation of the effort poured into it). It builds on the excellent open-source CC-CEDICT project, and in accordance with its CC BY-SA 3.0 license, I’ve made the source files available on GitHub at github.com/alfons.

by Alfons Grabher, alfonsgrabher.com