Words ending? (definition screen)

[julienvincenot]

Hello there,

I'm taking one of Outlier's course right now (intro to Chinese cursive)
and one of the participants was asking if there were any ressources / dictionaries
gathering Chinese words by their ending character, i.e. 大学，中学，小学，难学，科学…

I thought naturally Pleco could do that, since I often use the "words beginning" and "words containing" feature
when trying to identify if a new words I encounter actually belongs to two or more "bigger words" I didn't see yet in HSK lists.

But for some reason, I just didn't see a "words ending" in that list after all.
Is there a reason for that? Or perhaps it's disabled in a menu somewhere I couldn't find?

Thanks !

Julien

 

[HW60]

In Dictionary you can search with *学, in Organize Cards with = *学 (not ~ *学).

 

[Shun]

Hi Julien, hi HW60,

I think Pleco doesn't yet come with this feature, because if you use wildcards in your search, entering something like "?学", you will get all words with 学 in the second position, but not necessarily the last. I'd expect Pleco will allow some regular expressions for searching dicts in the future, which use the ^ and $ characters to mark beginnings and endings of lines.

To alleviate this, I took it up as an exercise to create a dictionary in Python based on the open source CC-CEDICT. I attach a text file which you could import into a new user dictionary in Pleco 3.2. (for instructions, see below)

The results are ordered by frequency.

I also include the Python source, which isn't "Pythonic" or elegant in any way, but it works for now. For it to run, you need the "regex" package, the UTF-8 CC-CEDICT from their webpage and the global BCC frequency list from these forums.

Enjoy, Shun


Edit from two days later: The dictionary now includes the pinyin and properly deals with homographs. I add the dictionary file and updated source to this post.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

Just add stars to your query:

***学

That should give you every word that ends in "学" - if not add another star: ****学

 

[Shun]

Hi @ACardiganAndAFrown,

Thanks, I didn't see this; with the wildcards, you get them ordered by length and then in alphabetical order. For most users, seeing the most common words first is very important, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Shun

 

[Shun]

Installation instructions for the "ending in" dictionary:

1. Copy the dictionary text file into Pleco using a cloud service or from an E-mail.

2. Go into Settings > Manage Dictionaries > Add User



3. Choose "Create New", name it "Ending in dictionary" (for example)

4. Open the new, empty dictionary from the list, set the abbreviation "END" (for example)

5. Choose "Import Entries", then select the text file from 1. and confirm.

Now, you can access the dictionary like this:




If you have any other wishes, feel free to post them.

Cheers, Shun

 

[Shun]

Thank you, @JD and David!

Shun