Does "pinyin + reverse search" work with characters as the reverse part?

If I remember correctly the example given for "pinyin + reverse search" was always:

>gao #tall

So if the pinyin pronunciation sans tone and meaning is known it can narrow down the search results.

Can this work with Chinese characters as well? Maybe something like the following for example:

>tangse #敷衍

I've tried it and it seems to only give results for 敷衍 instead.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No, at the moment we only support that for English searches. (in your case it's probably trying that search, getting confused and then doing what it always does when it can't come up with anything and has Chinese characters in the search field, which is to strip out anything other than Chinese characters and try again, this so that people pasting in weird messages with emoji / pinyin / English / esoteric text message number speak / etc they copied from WeChat or wherever can still get usable results)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No theoretical reason they couldn't be, just not quite clear on the wider usage case here - I suppose it's the same as the English usage case but for Chinese, but even for a native Chinese speaker I tend to think that scrolling through the result list for 'tangse' is faster than inputting 敷衍.
 
In one of my books I had "□" fei3 指呕吐。例:他中午吃醉酒了,fei3了一地。

So I wanted to search:

fei #吐

I wasn't sure what English phrase would be most common: throw up? (be) sick? vomit? barf? emesis? Chinese, though, would have been much easier: 吐. Sometimes English definitions cut words in two as well, like: throw sth. up.
 
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