Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters

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Looks like the edited “, indicating the original meaning “to plow a field.”” with new links got pushed down to the bottom with the original sentence still intact.
 
Yup!

We sent the data to Pleco for the next release a few days ago, and we've finished testing and it was released last night (Asia time)! Our process has gotten much, much better—there were only a few errors to fix this time around.

In this update, there are 500 new completed entries! That is, we now have completed Essentials Edition entries for the most frequently used 1250 characters + about 300 semantic components, with some overlap between those two categories, for a total of just over 1500 completed entries.

We'll be releasing another update within a month with another 250 completed entries, meaning the most frequently used 1500 characters will all have full entries in the Essentials Edition! The current version has the most common 750 completed, so that's double the current amount!

Shortly after that, we're going to do an update with a few hundred new Expert entries. The current version of the Expert Edition only has 38 Expert entries, so that will be a massive update for those of you who have the Expert Edition.

As I've said before, we've made some huge improvements to our development process over the past few months which will allow us to develop the dictionary much more quickly than we could before, so we'll (finally!) be able to start doing more frequent updates.

As always, get in touch if you have any questions!
 
Congratulations, John and team! This is fantastic news. And this will directly help my study as I run into characters without Outlier entries often, and I miss the info you guys provide when that happens. I’m also looking forward to potentially purchasing the Expert edition once that is further along.
 
John Renfroe said:
Yup!

We sent the data to Pleco for the next release a few days ago, and we've finished testing and it was released last night (Asia time)! Our process has gotten much, much better—there were only a few errors to fix this time around.

In this update, there are 500 new completed entries! That is, we now have completed Essentials Edition entries for the most frequently used 1250 characters + about 300 semantic components, with some overlap between those two categories, for a total of just over 1500 completed entries.
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Excellent job, guys!!!:)
 
great, thanks! request: include support for zhuyin "everywhere". i think pleco should be able to identify and convert pinyin automatically in your "plain text". alternatively outlier could mark up pinyin as such for pleco to convert.
 
To do this the way we do it in other dictionaries we'd need Outlier to surround every string of pinyin with some sort of <pinyin> tag - flagging pinyin in plaintext is harder than you might think (there are quite a few overlaps with English).
 
Regarding the difference between form components and meaning components, in many characters a component could be both, for example in 明, 日 is a meaning component while 月 is a form component. Why is that? Aren't both components form and meaning components, how do you assign the roles in a case like this?
 
wibr said:
Regarding the difference between form components and meaning components, in many characters a component could be both, for example in 明, 日 is a meaning component while 月 is a form component. Why is that? Aren't both components form and meaning components, how do you assign the roles in a case like this?
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1. Yes, sometimes it doesn't matter whether it's a form or meaning component. That is because for some components, the meanings expressed by form and by meaning are the same. Like 人, 火, etc. But it does matter a lot in cases like 大, 又, etc.
2. In the case of 明, it has to do with the evolution of that character. 明 was originally written 朙. At the time of creation, 月 was a form component. Later, 囧 turned into 日. Since 日 still makes sense for "bright," I don't call it corruption. At the time this change was completed, 日 had already stopped looking like the sun, so I call it a meaning component, since it's not getting its meaning via any kind of pictorial quality.
Hope that helps!
 
@Ash, quick trivia question: If you were to choose an existing entry that best shows off what you are trying to do, which entry would it be?

(Just asking, as I want to show off the dictionary to a few people)
 
pdwalker said:
@Ash, quick trivia question: If you were to choose an existing entry that best shows off what you are trying to do, which entry would it be?

(Just asking, as I want to show off the dictionary to a few people)
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I believe 土、足、路 where the big ones from the beginning - with expert data in the demo. Not sure if there are more prime examples now though.
 
pdwalker said:
@Ash, quick trivia question: If you were to choose an existing entry that best shows off what you are trying to do, which entry would it be?

(Just asking, as I want to show off the dictionary to a few people)
Click to expand...

Weird. I thought I'd answered this! It's hard to show off everything in a single entry, which is why the demo has 20 characters (@ACardiganAndAFrown pointed out 3 of the demo entries). If you want to show stuff about Old Chinese phonology, probably the Expert entry for 藍. For paleography, either Expert entry for 造 or 前. For pedagogy, basically any Essentials entry. The online demo actually shows system level stuff for 立, 各 and 尚, though that stuff isn't in the dictionary yet. We'll start adding after we have 2000 completed Essentials entries.
 
pdwalker said:
Now that you mention this, I think I vaguely recall that you did. My bad.

Thank you (and @ACadiganAndAFrown) for answering it again.
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No worries! I looked for an answer by me on this question and couldn't find one, yet I feel some sense of deja vu. Probably something I ate!
 
Refresh the file list (swipe down on iOS / tap the reload button on Android) and they should work correctly.
 
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