Dictionaries · head-to-head
Chinese Character Web vs Wordnik
The Chinese Character Web API (CCDB) is a free, read-only JSON API built on the Unicode Consortium's Unihan Database, covering Mandarin and Cantonese readings, Japanese on'yomi/kun'yomi, radicals, stroke counts, definitions, and simplified/traditional variant mappings for CJK Unified Ideographs, filterable by character-set encodings like GB2312, Big5, and Shift JIS. A live GET against /version returned a real 200 JSON body and Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * on the same Apache-served host.
Wordnik's REST API returns word definitions aggregated from multiple published dictionaries alongside example sentences, pronunciations, related words, and corpus-derived frequency data, documented through an interactive Swagger UI. Every developer gets a free Basic plan (100 calls/hour, with an explicit nonprofit/research allowance) before paid Hobby, Pro, and Enterprise tiers raise the ceiling up to 45,000 calls/hour -- revenue that funds Wordnik's nonprofit mission to document the English language.
| Chinese Character Web | Wordnik | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | None | API Key |
| Pricing | free | freemium |
| Formats | JSON | JSON |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | No | Yes |
Chinese Character Web needs no API key, while Wordnik requires API Key — pick Chinese Character Web to start without signup.