Meaning of * symbol

[David]

Can someone explain what the asterick * means in a dictionary entry? I didn't see an explanation in the manual. Maybe that's because it should be obvious. Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

The asterisks that appear within entries are section breaks - the'y're used when an entry covers more than one part of speech. In the printed version they appear as diamonds and we'll probably end up replacing them with those at some point.

The asterisks that appear at the start of entries are frequency indicators - when there are two or more words which have the same Pinyin when you ignore tones, the asterisk indicates the most commonly used one. This is a lot more useful in a paper dictionary than it is in an electronic one and we're debating whether or not we should continue to include them - we probably will for consistency with the printed version.

 

[gandq]

character frequency

hi mike,

i haven't really payed any attention to the asterisks yet, but it would be cool to have a frequency indication for each character (i.e. most frequently used, frequently used etc. - you know those statistics based lists). could be part of your planned 'character info' feature.

so long,



jo.

 

[mikelove]

Well we had to take character info out of 1.0, actually, but it should be possible to look frequency info up in the UniHan dictionary database at least.