Chinese-English Database of Place Names

We maintain the world's largest Chinese-English bilingual bidirectional databases of proper nouns, of which the following data sample is a subset focusing on Chinese and non-Chinese place names. Our proper noun databases are used by some of the world's major IT companies for a wide variety of applications, such as:

• machine translation (MT)
• information retrieval (IR)
• morphological analysis (MA)
• electronic dictionaries (ED)
• input method editors (IME)
• named entity recognition (NER)

See also our Comprehensive Database of Chinese Name Variants, which contains hundreds of thousands of name variants.

Our Chinese - English - Chinese database of Chinese and non-Chinese place names place names is very comprehensive.

Each entry includes various attributes such as readings in pinyin, zhuyin fuhao, Cantonese and several romanization systems, semantic classification codes and frequency rankings, locale codes, and other useful information such as frequency statistics, described in chinfreq.htm (but not shown here). Please contact Jack Halpern () for details and larger samples.

The data in any desired format, such as plain text files with fields delimited by tabs, Excel, Access, html, etc. in any encoding, such as UTF-8, UCS-2, EUC, GB-2312 and Big Five (the sample below is encoded in UTF-8).

The prefix "N" stands for "Name"

Common English name for Place

Name in Simplified Chinese

An example of orthographic conversion, marked "O" in the table below, is 头发 converted to 頭髮, and 出发 to 出發. An example of lexemic conversion, marked "L" in the table below, is 'laser', translated to 激光 in SC but to 雷射 in TC. For details, see Jack Halpern's paper The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion, presented at several international conferences.

Name in Traditional Chinese

Pinyin plus tone with hyphen separating syllables

Name rendered in Zhuyin fuhao transcription system