Description from extension meta
Look up the Chinese words of English words as well, and other great tools for learning Mandarin Chinese
Image from store
Description from store
CWS (Chinese words separator) is pronounced as Swiss.
Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary
Learn Chinese by reading, listening, and practicing speaking Chinese with this CWS army knife. Oh, and you can practice writing with it too.
Can be used by native Chinese speakers to learn English as well.
Instantly makes any web pages in Chinese as your learning resources.
Suddenly remembers a Chinese word (or needing to quickly know the Chinese word(s) of an English word(or phrase)) that is not in the page? CWS has a searchable dictionary (🔍 icon in CWS toolbar pop-up) that you can use in this situation. You can also use your device's microphone to search the word instead of typing it out.
Set your own learning priorities by color-coding and/or annotating the words with Pinyin(or zhuyin/bopomofo), HSK, or Familiarity. You already know how to pronounce most words, and you need reinforcement on their tones? Just color-code or annotate the hanzi(Chinese character) with tone. You just want to learn the Chinese language without needing to learn hanzi? You can make CWS convert the hanzi to pinyin automatically. The learner decides what to learn based on his/her priorities, not the tool.
Words separator for page and dictionary.
Demystifies Chinese readability by words separation and pinyin(or zhuyin/bopomofo) annotation.
Demystifies a Chinese character by separating it to its component characters, this can be done in the dictionary by right-clicking the character. Multi-characters word can be separated as well.
Mine sentences from imported Offline sentence miner.
Mine sentences from 10 or more online mining sites.
Learners can add more sentence mining sites by themselves without needing to ask the developer to update the list of 10 online sentence mining sites.
Hover less, read more using the extension's sentence mode dictionary, saves a lot of time.
Look up the meanings of a Chinese word and phrase while browsing the web.
Lookup the Chinese word(s) of an English word and phrase while browsing the web.
Easily change the hanzi's size and font of the page to make reading more relaxing.
Enhances tones memorization by using pin1yin1 IME.
Quite configurable, and easy to use.
Can be made to remember 3 websites visited for each word, this can be enabled in Recall and Rewrite modules.
Read the complete functionalities of CWS in https://chinese-words-separator.github.io/
**********
HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY:
Simply go to a web page in Chinese. Then to use the dictionary, hover the mouse cursor over any Chinese words (i.e., Chinese characters or even Chinese words that are not using pure Chinese characters, e.g., 3Q, AA制) to pop up the sticky note-like dictionary that shows the English translation of the Chinese word(or phrase) along with its pinyin (or zhuyin/bopomofo) romanization; on phone or tablet, just tap the Chinese word or sentence(or phrase).
HOW TO USE THE WORD OR CHARACTER SEPARATOR IN THE DICTIONARY:
Right-click the word(or phrase) or character in the dictionary. On phone/tablet, swipe the word(or phrase) or character to the right.
HOW TO USE THE WORDS SEPARATOR IN THE PAGE:
Choose any of the following: Beginner, Lower-intermediate, Intermediate, Advanced, or configure it in More Settings (⚙ icon in CWS pop-up toolbar) screen.
To make the extension work on Android, install Kiwi browser on your Android device:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowser.browser
then install CWS from Chrome Web Store.
Note: Kiwi browser is discontinued since January 2025, some of Kiwi's code is now integrated to Microsoft Edge Canary Android browser. Follow the instruction here to install extensions on Microsoft Edge Canary Android browser: https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next. CWS's extension id on Microsoft Edge Add-ons store is peglphdebebicogkcpinemlaanfabeip
If installing extensions on Microsoft Edge Canary Android browser is cumbersome, you can opt to use Lemur browser instead on your Android device:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lemurbrowser.exts
then install CWS from Chrome Web Store.
To use the extension on Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, install CWS from:
https://apps.apple.com/app/chinese-words-separator/id1598790017
For Chinese-Vietnamese, Chinese-French, Chinese-German, Chinese-Hungarian definitions, follow these instructions:
https://github.com/chinese-words-separator/chinese-words-separator.github.io/issues/27#issuecomment-2235239809
**********
Latest version (optimizations):
* Optimized the words separator's processor, it is now using just a 160 KB memory lookup to perform a task.
In the past, it was reading the word's HSK level from a big file which causes the words separator memory consumption to spike up to 100 MB; now the words HSK level info is embedded directly into the code, which is just 160 KB in size
* Optimized memory footprint for CWS's dictionary, it can now be just 26 MB.
CWS's dictionary can now be made significantly more lightweight than other dictionaries despite CWS having over 180K words (others have 120K words). This can be made possible by making CWS read the dictionary from the database instead of from file. To configure CWS to read the dictionary from the database instead of from file, go to CWS's Options screen and click the button labeled *Save the dictionary to database*. With database use, the dictionary's memory footprint will be reduced from 108 MB down to 26 MB
Other file-based dictionaries' memory footprint:
* Zhongwen: 42 MB
* LiuChan: 82 MB
* Inkah: 76 MB
* Zhongzhong: 45 MB
Versions: https://chinese-words-separator.github.io/versions.html
**********
Dictionary sources:
* CC-CEDICT - Over 120K words
* CedPane - Over 70K words, plenty of names and proper nouns
If you need to contribute word definitions, prefer contributing to CC-CEDICT:
https://cc-cedict.org/editor/editor.php?handler=ListChanges
If you need to contribute names and proper nouns, prefer contributing to CedPane:
https://github.com/ssb22/CedPane
Latest reviews
- (2025-07-09) Donna Nightingale: Amazing for learning! There is so much customization to choose from too.
- (2025-05-03) Corentin: This app is great. You've made my life better. Thank you so much!
- (2025-03-01) Ahg: I’ve been using this app for about two years now, and honestly I can’t live without it anymore, I guess that also means my Chinese haven’t improved enough haha So the "separating colors" feature for tone-based visualization is a complete game changer, it’s helped me remember pinyin visually thanks to this app, I’ve been complimented on my pronunciation by Chinese way more often, so I can’t thank you enough I have one question though, do you know of any websites where I can use this extension effectively for TTS while practicing? I’ve been using Natural Reader, but it's noticeably slow when loading sentences, so it’s not great for chatting with Chinese speakers , with something like Google Translate’s voice feature the extension doesn’t get applied there, so I can’t see both the tones (colors) and hear the audio simultaneously. Any recommendations for a better website? Thank you for creating such an amazing tool!
- (2024-12-29) Natan Dobre: They add the option for pdf file and that is great, but it still doesn't work well on E-book. If they would make it work also on E-books would be great.
- (2024-11-13) Dionysus Endendros: Love the extension. A minor usability request if it's possible: I have looked everywhere in the settings for a way to make the pop up dictionary appear above the current word instead of below and can't find a way. I am unable to use a mouse and keyboard due to a disability, so have to position the cursor over characters by voice command. Once the dictionary shows, it usually blocks the next line of text and i have to move it with another voice command to continue reading. You largely have great keyboard shortcuts, so props for that, makes disabled folks's lives easier :-)
- (2024-10-11) Rolan Rolan: Bruv, the fact that the dev replied a paragraph to a one word 1 star negative review tells me that this project is active lol. And the man cares about the project. Both beginners to expert benefits from this extension. There are lots of features but the design makes it so that you can use the extension immediately and explore the other settings later to avoid being overwhelmed. Good ting :) and u don't have to respond to negative reviews dev. We know the value, ignore the haters lol Edit: 2 weeks of using it, you can SOMETIMES get lost finding the settings that you want to change, some aren't categorized well ;-; It's a good thing there's a small tip when you hover to a setting so you understand what it does Bias <--> I haven't explored every feature tho so I'm probably not using this extension to its fullest potential, Still 5/5
- (2024-09-21) A A: Useless.
- (2024-09-11) 愛德華多: UPDATE: Thanks very much for the new feature. Now is really easy to enable/disable the dictionary. In the meanwhile I found out how to reproduce the problem in google translate, if you use it to translate from Chinese to English and after entering Chinese text you want to copy the text to the clipboard with Ctrl+C, the Ctrl key will activate the pop-up dictionary and afterwards the textbox for entering Chinese text is no longer editable and the text can't be changed anymore, the only solution is to reload the page. This is a great extension for Chinese learners. It replaces the Chinese popup dictionary, the simplified to traditional Chinese converter and it also has additional features which make it invaluable. There is still one missing feature I would love to have. Some easy way of disabling and enabling it (some popup dictionaries do this by clicking on their icon), now I have to keep the settings page open to switch it off there. Alternatively some sort of site whitelist for which the extension is not active would be great. I noticed that it does not work well on google translate site. Youtube also will stop playing the video when the popup appears. So I would like to disable the extension in those sites. Other than these tiny things I can only recommend this extension to every Chinese learner
- (2024-07-30) Vinh Lai: Thank you so much! This is just what I need. I hope Google doesn't remove it. They are trying to remove the Vietnamese version of this (Han-Viet)
- (2024-07-01) Mahsa Khosravi: how can i use it on pdfs that i open them on browser? is it also designed for that?
- (2024-06-24) M King: Great!
- (2024-06-17) Charles Tan: Its an amazing extension❗Super useful and convenient to use and learn Chinese Thanks you for making it❗
- (2024-05-29) Parsa Shamaeezadeh: Quite an amazing tool.
- (2024-03-09) Kantulaev: add dark mode on offline reading page. pls Best one for chinese believe me i tried so many different and it is all in one. SUPER customizible ty you are the best!!!!! UPDATE. Hey add second subs on netflix that would be awesome, i use different app for this, but its collapsinng with this ext, if it possible thanks. just a optinal feature. thanks!!
- (2024-02-15) takky koko: It's very convenient for learning. As a Japanese person, it's a bit inconvenient that the translation is in only English. It would be even more convenient if there was a way to change the language of the dictionary. Since the popup dictionary when I hover over a word is in English, I would like to change it to Japanese or another language. Is there a way to do that?
- (2023-12-05) Oleksandr Ivasenko: Super useful add-on. I found a "bug" which I like a lot. Thank you very much!!! Specifically, if a youtube video already has a dedicated Chinese subtitles (not automatically generated !) than clicking beginner mode I will get: 1)pinyin for each word (normal), 2) each word colored according to tones (normal), 3) a "bug": individual translation of each word under the character. cannot paste screenshot, but starting from Chinese subtitle in a video just by activating the extension I get: wǒ de fùyè ne shì yóu guǎn de 我 的 副业 呢 是 油 管 的 ... I of sideline ptc:inquiry be oil take care of For example when I activate your extension on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mte6Y3ThfAA I love that there is not only pinyin but also individual translations under each word. Any chance you can turn it into a feature that would work on any website containing Chinese texts? (at this moment, I only get 1)pinyin for each word (normal), 2) each word colored according to tones (normal)). If it is already a feature could you please tell me how to properly activate it, so that it provides word-for-word translation not only on youtube videos where the authors have made dedicated Chinese subtitles, but also on any non-video websites with Chinese text? P>S> after the developer has given detailed answer and a solution: THANK YOU VERY MUCH! Great product, attitude and professionalism!!!
- (2023-11-23) Natan Dobre: I would like to have the option of reading only they pinyin without the chinese characters and to have the same function like word separator and the translation when I hover on a word. That would be great!
- (2023-09-21) Raquel Coy: Excellent and invaluable tool for learning Chinese!
- (2023-09-21) Raquel Coy: Excellent and invaluable tool for learning Chinese!
- (2023-09-08) Sáng Nguyễn Quang: 很好
- (2023-09-08) Eric Paroissien: I solved the issue of the grey left pane for "read off line" that doesn't close by pasting my text into pastebin.com.
- (2023-09-08) Eric Paroissien: I solved the issue of the grey left pane for "read off line" that doesn't close by pasting my text into pastebin.com.
- (2023-08-17) Mini Duos Samsung: Great add-on, amazing job, great and very useful! Thanks a lot! Impressive update, a whole bunch of cool new features. Can a couple of things be made on top of this: 1. Make strokes colours in Calligraphy writer customizable (now fixed red/green, and these are quite popular colors for tone-coloring, so this could lead to some mess in mnemonics, because in Calligraphy writer these colors have no relation to tones. I'd personally would prefer blue or gray shades as they are not used in my tone-coloring scenario, similarly it can be possible for other users who use red/green for tone colors). 2. Now there are no tone-colors in popup dictionary, can tone colors be added there, too? At least to the lookup word itself and its pinyin/bopomofo? It could be especially useful for users in expert mode without text coloring to lookup specific words and immediately see their color tone which is a quicker and a more intuitive way of rendering and memorizing tones than tone diacritics or numbers.
- (2023-08-17) Mini Duos Samsung: Great add-on, amazing job, great and very useful! Thanks a lot! Impressive update, a whole bunch of cool new features. Can a couple of things be made on top of this: 1. Make strokes colours in Calligraphy writer customizable (now fixed red/green, and these are quite popular colors for tone-coloring, so this could lead to some mess in mnemonics, because in Calligraphy writer these colors have no relation to tones. I'd personally would prefer blue or gray shades as they are not used in my tone-coloring scenario, similarly it can be possible for other users who use red/green for tone colors). 2. Now there are no tone-colors in popup dictionary, can tone colors be added there, too? At least to the lookup word itself and its pinyin/bopomofo? It could be especially useful for users in expert mode without text coloring to lookup specific words and immediately see their color tone which is a quicker and a more intuitive way of rendering and memorizing tones than tone diacritics or numbers.
- (2023-08-13) mayblu: thjis extension is op ong bro thx sm helped a lot :3 i turned on the pinyin thing bc a lot of the newer words ive learned come from donghuas or cdramas and like i dont recognize some of the chars but recognize the word when i hear it ykwim
- (2023-08-13) mayblu: thjis extension is op ong bro thx sm helped a lot :3 i turned on the pinyin thing bc a lot of the newer words ive learned come from donghuas or cdramas and like i dont recognize some of the chars but recognize the word when i hear it ykwim
- (2023-07-22) Jose Jerez: This extension is amazing! Every feature I have ever wanted plus more than I hadn't thought I wanted is there. Just a note to those using HSK colour coding - I have realised that the HSK color coding is following HSK 3.0 (here: https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-vocabulary/) rather than 2.0. I think that makes sense for the new HSK 7-9 levels added with HSK 3.0 but for now HSK 1-6 vocabulary hasn't been implemented yet and it is planned to stay the same as 2.0 (as found here: https://hanpath.com/chinese/) for a few more years. For HSK 1-6 I would therefore recommend it follows the current format until it is changed. The only thing I'm missing is a less invasive option to save words since the current way to do so is to allow the extension to basically use your google spreadsheets through your google account which worries me a bit in terms of privacy. Otherwise incredible learning tool
- (2023-07-22) Jose Jerez: This extension is amazing! Every feature I have ever wanted plus more than I hadn't thought I wanted is there. Just a note to those using HSK colour coding - I have realised that the HSK color coding is following HSK 3.0 (here: https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-vocabulary/) rather than 2.0. I think that makes sense for the new HSK 7-9 levels added with HSK 3.0 but for now HSK 1-6 vocabulary hasn't been implemented yet and it is planned to stay the same as 2.0 (as found here: https://hanpath.com/chinese/) for a few more years. For HSK 1-6 I would therefore recommend it follows the current format until it is changed. The only thing I'm missing is a less invasive option to save words since the current way to do so is to allow the extension to basically use your google spreadsheets through your google account which worries me a bit in terms of privacy. Otherwise incredible learning tool
- (2023-07-01) Hans Yolo: killer
- (2023-07-01) Hans Yolo: killer
- (2023-02-18) Kamil: The pop-up extension with the widest range of features and customizability options. The menu might seem a bit convoluted and some of the options could be explained better but just invest 15minutes, play around with it and you'll figure it out. Would love the developer to add some more features that would make this extension even more amazing. Very useful.
- (2023-02-18) Kamil: The pop-up extension with the widest range of features and customizability options. The menu might seem a bit convoluted and some of the options could be explained better but just invest 15minutes, play around with it and you'll figure it out. Would love the developer to add some more features that would make this extension even more amazing. Very useful.
- (2022-09-21) Mr Peo: Cool
- (2022-09-21) Mr Peo: Cool
- (2022-09-04) Naga: There is just so much feature and customization available, this is by far the best pop-up dictionnary extension
- (2022-09-04) Naga: There is just so much feature and customization available, this is by far the best pop-up dictionnary extension
- (2022-08-30) Nguyễn Thơm: Toẹt vời ạ! cực kì hữu ích ạ!
- (2022-08-25) Ricardo Yap: I believe this is the best pop up dictionary for chrome extension! Because this extension has many unique features, such as words separator, color coding by HSK, pinyin for every word and even a voice on hover.
- (2022-08-25) Ricardo Yap: I believe this is the best pop up dictionary for chrome extension! Because this extension has many unique features, such as words separator, color coding by HSK, pinyin for every word and even a voice on hover.
- (2022-07-20) Cong Nguyen: I don't know why this plugin has so few users comparing to its very useful feature for new Chinese learner like me? - Pinyin explanation - Words separator - Voice on hover - Translation Definitely one of the best/must have chrome extension for me.
- (2022-07-20) Cong Nguyen: I don't know why this plugin has so few users comparing to its very useful feature for new Chinese learner like me? - Pinyin explanation - Words separator - Voice on hover - Translation Definitely one of the best/must have chrome extension for me.
- (2022-07-02) Công Nguyễn: very useful
- (2022-07-02) Công Nguyễn: very useful
- (2022-06-27) Konte: Great work, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. Just one suggestion: It would be great if it is possible to disable the extension for certain domains. For some pages, especially for dictionaries, it is quite inconvenient (example: https://dict.leo.org/chinesisch-deutsch/b%C3%B9x%C3%ACng ).
- (2022-06-27) Konte: Great work, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. Just one suggestion: It would be great if it is possible to disable the extension for certain domains. For some pages, especially for dictionaries, it is quite inconvenient (example: https://dict.leo.org/chinesisch-deutsch/b%C3%B9x%C3%ACng ).
- (2022-01-19) Russell: Excellent, loving it so far!
- (2022-01-19) Russell: Excellent, loving it so far!
- (2021-12-02) Sean kim: Awesome! I really used all Chinese dictionary extensions and removed all and use this only. This is the best. It is even working on kiwi mobile browser. Plus, it will be more useful if i can make the size of Hànzi smaller so that it cannot break the layout of website when it is with pinyin. And when i select dictionary as sentence it is little bit difficult to know which range I am hovering. Anyway, Thank you for making this awesome program.
- (2021-12-02) Sean kim: Awesome! I really used all Chinese dictionary extensions and removed all and use this only. This is the best. It is even working on kiwi mobile browser. Plus, it will be more useful if i can make the size of Hànzi smaller so that it cannot break the layout of website when it is with pinyin. And when i select dictionary as sentence it is little bit difficult to know which range I am hovering. Anyway, Thank you for making this awesome program.
- (2021-10-30) Axel Bryan Joel Yañez Meraz: The dictionary function is too slow.