Follow the evidence.
Explore words through their written characters, inspect the structure of a form, or compare two entries. Every kind of connection has a declared meaning.
The map, live
Start from an example, then select any card to grow its branch. All shows words written with the entry’s characters first, then its structure, then a few exact sound matches; Structure, Words and Sound show one kind at a time. Hover or long-press a card for its evidence.
moon; month
MANY CONNECTIONS
Why these entries connect
Edition and scope ↗Explore the connected entries
Open the full character index ↗Four useful ways to explore
Component search. Type parts:氵+青 into the main search. Both shapes must appear in the character’s structure, also inside its parts. A repeated shape such as parts:木 木 must appear that many times. The index follows the first regional structure description (IDS) kept for each character.
Word families. Browse every dictionary record using a character, including words beginning or ending with it, other records for the same form, and explicit source cross-references. These are spelling relationships, not claims about morpheme boundaries or synonymy.
Sound. Separate same-tone Mandarin, tone-independent syllable matches, exact Cantonese readings, historical reading records and attributed phonetic-component analyses. Matching modern readings do not prove a common origin.
Comparison. Pin one reference and explore another entry. Compare components and trace the shortest available path through a selected structural graph. Paths are undirected navigation routes through preserved assertions, not a chronology or measure of linguistic distance.
Evidence & coverage
125,400 word records, 8,243 character records (researched or straight from the sources), 681 extra component shapes that are not characters of their own, 21,702 resolved source references, 16,508 links between characters and their written parts, 2,623 attributed sound-component links. Counts are snapshot coverage, not usage frequency.
9,245 IDS descriptions parse completely; 268 are retained verbatim and marked incomplete. Recursive descent stops at missing descriptions, cycles or twelve levels. The interactive decomposition view opens up to three levels at a time.
The map shows a bounded selection, up to 144 open nodes and 384 edges. Relationship lists page through the full indexed group. Component search and path tracing run in a dedicated worker; ordinary dictionary search does not load that structural index.
Machine-readable coverage & transformations · CC-CEDICT source and license · BabelStone IDS source and reuse notice · Unihan 17.0.0 and catalog editions · CJKVI and phono-ml scholarship, attribution and licenses
CJKVI-derived phonetic assertions remain under GPL-2.0-only with the retained upstream input and build script. CC-CEDICT-derived records and lexical relationships retain CC BY-SA 4.0 attribution. phono-ml retains CC BY 4.0 attribution. No source has been silently relabeled or merged into an invented scholarly account.