Pleco: a power-user guide

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

Pleco is the Chinese dictionary app I use every day, but most people only ever type a word into the search box and stop there. It’s got a search syntax and a set of dictionaries that reward digging in a little further.

Search tricks

Pulled straight from the Pleco iOS Manual and worth memorizing:

Mixed search: you can mix characters and Pinyin in the same search, at least for the first three characters, so you don’t need to know every character to find a word.
? wildcard: stands in for a single character you don’t know.
* wildcard: stands in for up to three unknown characters in a row.
v for ü: Pleco automatically converts a typed v to ü, so you don’t need to hunt for the umlaut on a phone keyboard.
# full-text search: prefixing a search with #, followed by English or Chinese, runs a full-text search across dictionary entries instead of just headwords.
C and E buttons: if the icon is hollow instead of filled in, the result is coming from a full-text search. C or E tells you the entry’s language, and a doubled C or E (CC, EE) means it’s a full-text search result within a dictionary of that same language.

Useful dictionaries you might be skipping

The UNI dictionary is Pleco’s name for Unihan, the Unicode Consortium’s Han character database. It’s a good source for stroke counts, radical breakdowns, and cross-references between simplified/traditional and variant characters that the regular dictionaries don’t always surface.

Chinese on Justin McLemore

Pleco: a power-user guide

Overview

Search tricks

Useful dictionaries you might be skipping