Arguably the LARGEST Chinese - English Dictionary Online

[buzhongren]

tooironic: As for print dictionaries, they are behind on this word

Ive mentioned only two online Chinese English dictionaries that even refer to it in some fashion. Care to add some more. Encyclopedias dont count. You also havent said if someone is LBT if they can use it to identify themselves. Google only seems to indicate G.

xiele,

Jim

[tooironic]

You're missing my point, yet again. The dictionaries - both print and online - are demonstrably behind on this sense. That's it. It has nothing to do with encyclopedias or self-identification or Google.

[chrix]

Incidentally, does anyone know some kind of Chinese equivalent to www.urbandictionary.com? I do find my Chinese dictionaries a little bit too prudish sometimes, and I think they at the very least are much more so than English dictionaries, though admittedly I haven't undertaken any in-depth comparisons...

[tooironic]

I find Baidu or Hudong is usually good for that. Either that or just asking friends. I think your hunch about prudeness is correct. I can't think of any examples off-hand, but I have come across dead ends from time to time when trying to defining certain taboo words. Kind of annoying, I guess, but does make it more exciting when you finally find it.

[buzhongren]

tooironic: You're missing my point, yet again. The dictionaries - both print and online - are demonstrably behind on this sense

toironic: I have this habit of entering 同志 in every new online dictionary I come across. Unfortunately Microsoft didn't pass the test

General purpose dictionaries arent required to add specialty terms like slang,medical,military,business,etc. It doesnt make them behind on anything. If one dictionary has more entries than another you get what you pay for.

xiele,

Jim

[tooironic]

Says who? A good dictionary should include as many senses as possible, especially an online or electronic dictionary. And 同志 is hardly some weird-arse slang that only Ethiopians use. It has demonstrated widespread use.

[liuzhou]

Anyway the LARGEST Chinese - English Dictionary Online couldn't find the first word I looked for, so I gave up decidedly unimpressed.

(nciku has it. iciba has it. mdbg has it)

[tooironic]

Oooh, do tell.

[buzhongren]

Its easy to find characters and words in one dictionary and not another. If it is professional vernacular or parochial terms even more so. If dictionaries were the same then anyone would do. Id say take any two English dictionaries go to the same starting point and you wouldnt go 10 words before a mismatch. The first page of the Google Book Chinese ABC dictionary doesnt look anything like my English equivalents. Ive never seen so many words with the compound A tones. My best dictionary 1960 Daigkusyorin Chinese/Japanese which has its fair share of first page A tones. What stands out are the characters for Ammonia which isnt in my other print dictionaries. I wouldnt expect it because it is a chemical term. This is my desktop top reference for the Chinese existence. There are three Japanese entries for TongZhi.

[chrix]

I find Baidu or Hudong is usually good for that. Either that or just asking friends. I think your hunch about prudeness is correct. I can't think of any examples off-hand, but I have come across dead ends from time to time when trying to defining certain taboo words. Kind of annoying, I guess, but does make it more exciting when you finally find it.

I've been using the approaches suggested by you, it's just I'd think it'd be nice if there was a site dedicated to the collection of slang terms like we have for English or Indonesian

[tooironic]

@buzhongren I think it's bizarre that you're comparing a chemical term with a very common slang word like 同志, but hey, I've given up trying to use logic with you.

@chrix There's a smattering of slang resources all over the net. Off the top of my head there's the Mandarin Chinese Profanity page, the Colloquial and Slang pages @ Wiktionary and ShanghaiDaily's blog. There are also a dozen or so decent slang/colloquial reference books out there with varying degrees of quality, my favourite being Pop Chinese: A Cheng & Tsui Handbook Of Contemporary Colloquial Expressions. Lastly, here are a few I just Googled: languagerealm.com, chinese-tools.com and coolslang.com, chinasmack.com

[buzhongren]

tooironic: I've given up trying to use logic with you.

I have one print dictionary that carries both. I have others that carry neither. Slang like chemical terms is not a requirement in modern dictionaries online or print. Each time I show you examples. All you can point to is a Google word count and equate an encyclopedia to a dictionary. It wont be the first time where I assume an out of favor political term like comrade will be replaced by public at large slang meaning but till then. Ive seen news reporting where TongZhi is used by the peasants in the countryside where the Communist ideology still exists.

[imron]

I have never come across anyone who said to me, upon my saying it, "What a strange foreign slang!"

No doubt, but I have a number of friends who if you had said to them you were a 同志 they would simply think that you were saying you were a comrade rather than saying you were gay.

[chrix]

thanks, tooironic, for these additional sites, they're certainly useful, but compared with the Urban Dictionary, or the Indonesian Males Banget site these still look to be quite preliminary. Here's hoping one of them will develop into a truly comprehensive resource for Mandarin slang!

[trevelyan]

Somewhat late to this discussion, but people may be interested to know we track and add slang as part of our open source Chinese dictionary at Popup Chinese.(download it as part o the Adso project here) All entries are tagged with gloss, pinyin, simplified and traditional forms as well as a part-of-speech tag.

Slang entries are tagged with the string "SLANG" in this part-of-speech tag (this is the FLAG field in the MySQL database). The are probably at least a hundred entries at this point. Most are tagged with other parts-of-speech as well. And the entire dictionary is somewhere over 200,000 entries at this point.

Do we claim to have definitions for everything? Not at all. But we are pretty comprehensive by now and if anything is missing it is easy enough to add it by clicking on the "add" button in the dictionary interface. We're processing new additions at least once every two weeks now, and suggestions on improvements are always welcome as well.

[chrix]

trevelyan, can you get your dictionary to just display the slang terms, and maybe also in an A-Z order. I'm a great fan of the concept of Urban Dictionary (the layout, the community aspect, the wealth of examples and so forth) and am looking basically for something similar for Mandarin slang...

Probably for it to be a really useful site, it would have to be a Chinese-only site with lots of Chinese users, but this kind of website might run into trouble with the harmony crabs...

[tooironic]

No doubt, but I have a number of friends who if you had said to them you were a 同志 they would simply think that you were saying you were a comrade rather than saying you were gay.

Maybe if a straight person said it, sure. But I've never had that misunderstanding. And what white person would ever say "I'm a comrade?" Chinese people are smart enough to join the dots.

At any rate, I never said that the primary sense is obsolete, but that the new sense is widely used and should be recognised in dictionaries as such.

[chrix]

of course there are white comrades as well... though Communist Party members are far and few between in the West, and even though there are many more Social Democrats (in some parts of the English speaking world known as Labour/Labor Party members* ), they usually don't consider Communists their comrades, so they probably wouldn't introduce themselves as such...

* As far as UK Labour and Australian Labor go, I don't think they would refer to themselves as "comrades" in a domestic context, but I guess things would be different if they would be present for a meeting of the Socialist International, which is an organisation of mainly Social Democratic parties around the world...

[Glenn]

the renowned private Christian university in Kyoto, called Dōshisha, or 同志社...

I spent a year there, actually, and had 5 or 6 Chinese classmates (out of 11 or 12). And the topic of 同志 came up in class one day, where they all seemed to agree on the "gay" meaning. One of them said that when their friends saw the name of the school they were going to they were asked "what kind of school is that?!" They were all mainlanders, except for one Taiwanese girl (who wasn't the one whose friend asked about the school).

So there's some more anecdotal evidence for you.

[imron]

Maybe if a straight person said it, sure. But I've never had that misunderstanding. And what white person would ever say "I'm a comrade?" Chinese people are smart enough to join the dots.

On two separate occasions, years apart and with two different sets of people, I have seen foreigners having confused conversations with Chinese people, with the foreigner using the word 同志 to mean gay and the Chinese using the word 同志 to mean comrade. The first instance was a straight foreigner asking a group of Chinese men if they were 同志 (and mistakenly trying to impress them with his 'knowledge' of Chinese slang), and the second was the foreigner saying he was a 同志. In both cases the Chinese people were 'joining the dots' and thinking that 同志 was referring to someone supportive of the CCP.

For younger people, especially from larger cities, or for people in the LGBTI communities I'm sure it's not a problem. The majority of Chinese people however don't fall into those demographic groups.

I'm not saying 同志 doesn't mean gay, just that I don't think its usage is that widespread in the general mainland Chinese community.