Chinese Open Wordnet
汉语开放词网

We are creating a large scale, freely available, semantic dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: the Chinese Open Wordnet, inspired by the Princeton WordNet and the Global WordNet Grid.

As well as being searchable online, the data from this project is available to download. If you are interested in joining in the construction, or have any questions, please contact us.

Please feel free to use the wordnet in any way you please (license). If you use it for research, please cite one (or more) of our papers.

The synsets and relations (hypernyms, meronyms, ...) are based on Princeton WordNet 3.0, enriched with Chinese lexical units. COW also adds 2,028 synsets of its own (concepts lexicalised in Chinese, chengyu, classifiers and pronouns), linked into the hierarchy by 4,796 relations.

• 47,124 synsets
• 109,045 senses
• 85,147 unique words (84,790 with pinyin)
• 6,534 Chinese definitions

Disclaimer: This release has limited coverage and almost certainly still contains errors. We welcome feedback.

Source

Note that the version on the server has newer editions that may not be in the downloadable version yet.

• 2026-10-24: COW 1.1: 4,948 wrong or malformed senses removed after a checked LLM review, 539 lemma forms fixed, 1,078 checked senses added back, 614 examples
  • cow-1.1.tar.xz (WN-LMF 1.4 package for the wn module; requires omw-en:2.0)
  • wn.download("https://github.com/bond-lab/cow/releases/download/v1.1/cow-1.1.tar.xz")
• 2026-10-23: COW 1.0, the curated Chinese wordnet from the NTU-MC, with about 6,000 new definitions and a review of lemmas by Jia Qi Yeo
  • cow-1.0.tar.xz (WN-LMF 1.4 package for the wn module; requires omw-en:2.0)
  • wn.download("https://github.com/bond-lab/cow/releases/download/v1.0/cow-1.0.tar.xz")
• 2014-01-23 (initial public beta release)
  • list of synset-lemma pairs (tab separated)

References

Shan Wang and Francis Bond (2013)

Building the Chinese Wordnet (COW): Starting from Core Synsets. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Asian Language Resources: ALR-2013 a Workshop of The 6th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-6). Nagoya. pp.10-18.

Shan Wang and Francis Bond (2013)

Theoretical and Practical Issues in Creating Chinese Open Wordnet (COW). Paper presented at The 7th International Conference on Contemporary Chinese Grammar (ICCCG-7), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Francis Bond and Ryan Foster (2013)

Linking and extending an open multilingual wordnet. In 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-2013. Sofia. 1352–1362

Contributors

Shan Wang, Francis Bond, Luis Morgado da Costa …

Links

• Princeton WordNet of English (the original wordnet)
• Open Multilingual Wordnet (many wordnets linked together: we use their code to compile and search our wordnet)
• Global WordNet Association
• Other Chinese Wordnets/Lexicons
  • Chinese Wordnet (National Taiwan University)
  • Chinese Wordnet (South Eastern University)
  • Bilingual Ontological Wordnet (Academica Sinica)

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the makers of the Princeton wordnet and the Chinese wordnets for their help, encouragement and access to their data. This research was supported by the MOE Tier 1 grant Shifted in Translation—An Empirical Study of Meaning Change across Languages (2012-T1-001-135) and the NTU HASS Incentive Scheme Equivalent But Different: How Languages Represent Meaning In Different Ways.

This page is hosted at <github.com/bond-lab/cow>.