Laowai Chinese Dictionary

New in 5.2: adaptive rounds with recorded context, connected grammar, a richer Library, and recall on Watch, widgets, and Live Activity.

Look up Chinese anywhere — even offline — then turn every useful word into something you can actually use.

Laowai is a free Chinese-English dictionary and learning companion. Search by Chinese characters, pinyin, or English meaning, explore a word in real context, save what matters, and let adaptive practice bring it back at the right time.

FREE OFFLINE DICTIONARY

• 124,000+ Chinese-English entries powered by CC-CEDICT. • 106,000+ Chinese-English example sentences. • Search by simplified or traditional characters, pinyin, and English. • Read every meaning on its own line. • Hear pronunciation, explore related words, examples, grammar, and stroke order.

LEARN WHAT YOU NEED NEXT

• Keep HSK collections, curated lists, favourites, history, and personal lists close to practice. • Preview the exact mix before starting a round. • Choose listening, speaking, translation, sentence, tone, and character-writing tasks. • Run a character-writing-only round or pause grammar whenever that suits your goal. • Use grammar as a reference, then practise a connected pattern when it matches your words. • Checked answers shape accuracy; lightweight Remember / Forgot signals adjust review timing without pretending you passed a quiz.

READ AND LISTEN IN THE LIBRARY

• Explore recorded dialogues, guided readers, stories, and Chinese classics. • Import EPUB, TXT, and FB2 books and texts. • Move through contents and chapters without losing your place. • Select a complete word or phrase for dictionary lookup and translation. • Follow text-to-speech highlighting, with pause, stop, and speed controls. • Prefer authentic sentence audio automatically when a real recording is available.

KEEP CHINESE CLOSE

• Review from Home Screen widgets, Live Activity, and Apple Watch. • Use Remember / Forgot as an honest recall signal that brings forgotten words back sooner without changing checked accuracy. • Receive thoughtful study reminders and open the right list directly from supported links and notifications. • Keep lists, texts, reading position, and learning progress current across devices with optional iCloud sync.

LAOWAI PRO

Dictionary and search stay free. Laowai Pro unlocks unlimited practice, unlimited widgets and Live Activity, and iCloud sync. Prices and terms are always shown before purchase.

DATA SOURCES

Dictionary data is derived from CC-CEDICT under CC BY-SA 4.0. Example and recorded material includes clearly attributed licensed and first-party sources. Full source and licence details are available inside the app under Profile > Data Sources.

Software: Arseniy Dorogin and Dmitry Polyansky Design: Dmitry Polyansky