Hanyu Da Zidian 漢語大字典(汉语大字典) Online

The Hanyu Da Zidian (Chinese: 漢語大字典/汉语大字典; pinyin: Hànyǔ Dà Zìdiǎn; literally "Great Compendium of Chinese Characters") is one of the best available reference works on Chinese characters. A group of more than 400 editors and lexicographers began compilation in 1979, and it was published in eight volumes from 1986 to 1989. A separate volume of essays (Li and Zhao 1990) documents the lexicographical complexities for this full-scale Chinese dictionary. Besides the weighty 5,790-page first edition, there are 3-volume (1995) and pocket (1999) editions. A second edition (pictured at right) was published in 2006, and has a list of radicals printed on the dust jacket of each volume for quicker character look up.

 The above snippet is from the Wikipedia entry for the Hanyu Da Zidian.

Hanyu Da Zidian

It's only a character dictionary. But it does have more individual unique characters than the Hanyu Da Cidian.

Hanyu Da Cidian

I think they also came out with an edition in traditional characters as well.

Not sure about that. But you might want to use the online edition in traditional.

online Hanyu Da Zidian

It only has slightly more than 3,000 of the most common characters, but, then beggars can't be choosers.

And there are minor errors because of font issues. But nothing major.

For instance, for the character 幸, they've got.

Whereas a scanned copy obtained off the Internet has。

I figure this is a font issue in that they couldn't type out the character so they used a place holder in place of the actual character.

It's a pretty good literary Chinese dictionary.

Who would have known that 甫 meant “I， me” according to the 爾雅（尔雅）。 Look in any literary Chinese dictionary。 And I've looked in several。

Oh， and you could also use the Firefox add to search bar function if you've got the add on installed. This dictionary and the Guoyu Cidian put out by the Ministry of Education on The Republic of China (Taiwan) make pretty good literary dictionaries.

Kobo.

Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants 教育部異體字字典

The Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants (教育部異體字字典) put out by the Republic of China (Taiwan)'s Ministry of Education is an invaluable resource, but, if you do use it use the beta version because the older edition has a lot of errors. Probably because of issues with font.

Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants 教育部異體字字典 (old edition)

Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants 教育部異體字字典 (new trial edition)

For instance, here is the explanation behind the variant character 将 for the more "traditional" 將.

As you can see they've got the wrong character in the explanation behind their research. They've got the character 婔 instead of 将.

There are a lot of these errors in the current edition of the dictionary. I compiled a long list of examples, but, lost them all because of a catastrophic hard disk failure.

So, if you're doing research on character variants, be aware and use the trial version. Though it probably has errors as well. Wonder how many errors are being introduced because of issues with techonology, 

Kobo wrote:
So, if you're doing research on character variants, be aware and use the trial version. Though it probably has errors as well. Wonder how many errors are being introduced because of issues with techonology, 

 I just realized that if you don't have the proper fonts installed 将 will look like either 

The variant that is now the standard on Japan. Or it'll look like this.

This means that the new trial version is going to have a lot of errors because of fonts.

Because if I recall correctly from Ken Lunde book published by O'Reilly on CJKV fonts. When they came up with the encoding scheme they consulted on the codepoints between the various nations and regions that used Chinese characters at one time or another in the various languages. The mainland would use the same codepoints but use "simplified" while the other regions used "traditional" according to their chosen "standard". A core character set for writing. It was only later that they decided to include every character variant under the sun. So they screwed up with the original set. Where the same character codepoint was used for the various variants then in the core set.

Difficult to explain. Anyway, with the Dictionary of Character Variants going for character encoding for the variants instead of graphics, this is going to introduce a whole new variety of error to their dictionary.