Licenses & attributions
Everything on this site that came from somewhere else, and what that source requires.
Stroke order data — hanzi-writer-data
Arphic Public License — Stroke-order animation and tracing on character pages.
The unmodified license text must travel with the data. We have not modified any glyph data; if we ever do, the change and its date will be published in a public repository.
hanzi-writer
MIT — Rendering and quiz interaction for stroke order.
Copyright notice and permission notice retained.
CC-CEDICT
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 — English definitions and example words.
Attribution and a link to the license. Entries we reproduce are kept in their own fields, separate from text we write ourselves.
Unicode Character Database (Unihan)
Unicode License v3 — Code points, stroke counts, radical assignment.
Copyright and permission notice reproduced. © 1991–present Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved.
HSK
Registered trademark — descriptive use only — Level labels on example words.
Word lists are described as “aligned with HSK 3.0 levels”. Study Chinese Characters is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by the HSK examination authorities, and does not use HSK logos.
What we wrote ourselves
- Chinese definitions on this site are written by Study Chinese Characters. They are not taken from any published dictionary.
- Memory aids are written by Study Chinese Characters and are labelled as memory aids, not as historical etymology. They only use components that are actually part of the character.
- Structural breakdowns are published only where a human has confirmed them. Where we are not sure, the section is left out rather than filled in.
Not used
We do not use the Jun Da character/word frequency lists (non-commercial only). Frequency data is built in-house. Copyleft decomposition datasets (CHISE IDS, cjkvi-ids, makemeahanzi dictionary.txt) are build-time cross-checking inputs only and are never shipped to the browser.