ZYMCI Proper Noun Dictionary

When you first see the name ZYMCI it seems quite unusual but it has been chosen for several reasons. ZYMCI is meant to be an abbreviation for 专有名词 (Zhuan Yong Ming Ci) so it’s ZYM then 词 as full word CI.

ZYMCI is a very short name so it’s hopefully really easy for you to remember and perfect for people browsing on mobile phones.

In terms of short names, ZYMCI has taken inspiration from our favourite other online Chinese dictionary MDBG.

Do you like the name ZYMCI? What words would you like to see added to ZYMCI? ZYMCI will soon have lots more names added. ZYMCI is aiming for 30,000 words in the English-Chinese dictionary by the end of 2012.

ZYMCI is aiming to be a fully multilingual proper noun dictionary. At the moment there is ZYMCI English but shortly (end of 2012/beginning of 2013) ZYMCI German, ZYMCI Spanish, ZYMCI Italian, ZYMCI Portuguese, ZYMCI Russian and French will be live.

ZYMCI Chinese-English is nearly fully operational. With the Proper Noun Dictionary, we believe that it’s important that people can find what they are looking for, no matter what language they speak. All these translations are done manually and that’s why the other non-Chinese and non-English dictionary entries are still not live. At ZYMCI we felt that it was important that the translations were done manually to preserve the high quality and standards. ZYMCI has bilingual editors and translators but English and Chinese are our mother tongues. As such, ZYMCI has to hire external translators to translate the entries from Chinese and English into the other languages. This can be costly and so will take place slowly. ZYMCI English already has over 15,000 entries and with the aim of 25,000 entries by the end of 2012. ZYMCI is not based upon any existing dictionary.

Does ZYMCI accept dictionary submissions?

At the moment the proper noun dictionary does not accept submissions. This is due to the time required to answer to all emails and to verify every entry that is to be added to the dictionary. There is also the worry that ZYMCI would get a large volume of spam emails as a result of making an email address public.

At ZYMCI we felt that when speaking Chinese, there are so many Proper Nouns that you want to use all the time and you are unable. You want to talk about the area that you live in, historical people, movies you have watched and much more. One problem with learning Chinese is that many learners find that they can express certain words in Chinese but they don’t know the Chinese names for say House of Flying Daggers . Chinese is hard language to speak but surely it’s important to be able to understand who is being referred to in a Newspaper? Or know how to actively say Proper Nouns.

ZYMCI is unusual in that we don’t have other words, just Proper Nouns (and a few phrases that we believe could count as Proper Nouns). Will you need another dictionary? The answer is yes, but ZYMCI will add much more detail to your existing knowledge.