This guide collects search sites for research on Japanese vocabulary and Sino-Japanese words — above all sites built in China — so that they can be surveyed at a glance and searched with ease.
Finding prior research
Enter keywords to search for most articles published in academic journals in China.
A registration-based paper search site; a database holding the full text of major Chinese journals.
Dictionaries
The following sites help when tracing the sources of Sino-Japanese words.
A general dictionary site, weighted toward modern Chinese.
Look up CJK characters by their components and structure, with character readings and encodings.
Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants（教育部《異體字字典》）dict.variants.moe.edu.tw
Chinese standard and variant characters, searchable by radical, stroke count, structure, or pronunciation.
Full-text search of the English–Chinese dictionaries in its collection.
Note: 四库全书电子版 and 台湾中央研究院网站 can be hard to reach at times.
Corpora
Peking University and BLCU corpora
Taiwan: Academia Sinica corpora
ILAS Chinese Spoken Language Resources（中央研究院中文口語語料庫）tmc.ling.sinica.edu.tw
A portal to Academia Sinica's Mandarin speech collections, including conversations, sociophonetic interviews, child speech, and phonological development data. Transcripts and annotations vary by collection. Search requires an account; some datasets have separate academic licences.
Document databases
Search and reference sites
顧國林
A site that even specialists in Chinese praise highly — probably the richest search tool in the field anywhere online. It gathers the classical texts and other materials needed for Chinese historical linguistics: rime-book and character-dictionary search, Chinese dialectology, historical phonology (reconstructions by fourteen scholars for Middle Chinese and seven for Old Chinese, rhyme data from the Shijing, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese readings), paleography (bamboo and wooden slip texts), historical linguistics (cognate dictionaries and neighboring languages such as Tibetan, Mongolic, Manchu, Kam–Tai, and Hmong), toponymy, and more. It also carries useful tools such as an IPA input method and statistics.
复旦大学中华文明数据中心・复旦大学东亚语言数据中心ccdc.fudan.edu.cn
Covers Middle and Old Chinese phonology, and its dialect maps are the highlight: users can build their own, so many maps of real interest exist. Detailed field-survey data is also available.
A site founded by several Taiwanese institutions, offering search over paleography, phonology, and exegesis resources.
Registration required; whether it charges is unclear. With a collection of over twenty thousand Chinese classical texts and sixty dictionaries, from modern ones to calligraphy dictionaries, searchable across more than two hundred thousand characters, it is the richest dictionary and classical-text site on the Chinese internet.
Dialects
Taiwanese Hokkien Corpus Searchtggl.naer.edu.tw
The National Academy for Educational Research's Taiwanese Hokkien corpus combines speech transcripts, textbooks, dictionary examples, and historical texts. Search in Chinese characters or Tâi-lô and inspect context and collocations. Some examples include downloadable audio; bulk corpus downloads require an application.
Taiwan Hakka Corpuscorpus.hakka.gov.tw
Written and spoken Hakka from Taiwan, covering Sixian, Hailu, Dapu, Raoping, Zhao'an, and Southern Sixian. Search corpus examples and examine recurring word sequences with the n-gram tool. Corpus search requires login.
words.hk Cantonese Dictionarywords.hk
A community-written dictionary of Hong Kong Cantonese, with Jyutping readings, Cantonese definitions, English glosses, and usage examples.
Hong Kong Cantonese Corpusgithub.com
Transcripts of Cantonese conversations, radio programmes, and a monologue recorded in 1997–1998, with word segmentation, part-of-speech tags, and Jyutping. Transcripts can be downloaded; only sample audio is available.
東国正韻データベースClosedView archive
Premodern texts and excavated documents
Shidiangujiwww.shidianguji.com
Read and search premodern Chinese books, with filters by period and subject and images alongside transcribed text.
Searchable premodern Chinese texts with linked dictionaries, parallel passages, and scans of source editions.
CHANT Chinese Ancient Texts Databasewww.chant.org
The Chinese University of Hong Kong's collections of ancient Chinese texts, including oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions, bamboo and silk manuscripts, and transmitted works. Full-text search is available by collection. Access requires a subscription login.
CBETA Onlinecbetaonline.dila.edu.tw
Read and search Chinese Buddhist texts, with canonical references and textual variants.
Historical phonology and character readings
A site devoted to shi and ci poetry and other verse, with a poetry database and search and detection of rhyme and tonal patterns.
郭家寶（BYVoid）
Carries photographic reproductions and reconstructed readings of the essential phonological classics — the Guangyun, Zhongyuan Yinyun, Hongwu Zhengyun Jian, and Fenyun Cuoyao — with very convenient search.
鈴木慎吾
Databases and tools for Chinese historical phonology, with a focus on Middle Chinese.
Web韻圖（韻鏡）suzukish.sakura.ne.jp
鈴木慎吾
Displays characters from the Guangyun in rime tables, with reconstructed Middle and Old Chinese readings.
References
- 于拙 (2023). “中国語関係オンライン・ツールまとめ：音韻・文字・訓詁” (in Japanese)
Acknowledgments
This guide is part of research results funded by the following project:
Gakushuin University Computer Centre, 2024 Special Research Project
「古典日本語連語表現の検索コンコーダンスシステムの拡張と応用研究」
(Lead: 安部清哉; research collaboration and implementation: 于拙)