Feature request -most common words containing char "x"

Hi,

There is one feature that keeps me going back to Wenlin on my laptop that I would love to see on Pleco for iphone. In Wenlin, after you look up a character, you have the option of clicking on "list words containing [character x] (most common words first)".

I find this immensely useful: when I look up a forgotten (or newly encountered) character, it is really handy to be able to immediately get an idea of what context I am most likely to see the character. On Pleco, I typically have to wade through a long list of obscure words.

On a different note, I also like the idea of imitating Wenlin's "List characters containing "x" as component", although to me this is of secondary importance. (This was discussed earlier here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1761). While I'm at it, I should also mention that I like Wenlin's etymological info too, that doesn't seem to be available in the Pleco version of the ABC dictionary.

Thanks for all of your great work!
 
Thanks mfcb.

I am aware that Pleco for iphone has a "list words containing" function. The key term in my request is "most common". In other words, I think it would be great to be able to rank the list of words that contain a given character so that the most common words show up first in the list. This feature is available in Wenlin.

As Pleco currently stands, you can look up a new character and then look at the "list words containing". However I think the list would be much more useful if you had some idea which words were in common use (eg, likely to turn up frequently in a newspaper or tv show) and which ones are rare or not in modern use.

Of course, any such ranking will likely be somewhat subjective and depend on the corpus that is analyzed to come up with the ranking. That said, I find this "most common words" ranking is one of the few features that keeps me running back to Wenlin on a regular basis. That's the reason I thought I'd bring it up!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's certainly a possibility once we finish building a frequency list we're happy with - good Chinese word frequency lists are quite difficult to come by / come up with so we've had to develop one ourselves and it's taking a while to get that finished.
 
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