This dictionary deals with the etymology of Chinese characters. Most Chinese characters are words by themselves
with a few exceptions, e.g. the characters in butterfly (hu2die2) only have independent meaning as allusions to the two-character word. While most characters are words, most Chinese words are not just a single character, but rather are composed of at least two characters. Chinese has many hundreds of thousands of words, most of which are created by combining just a few thousand characters.
The etymology of these words is usually straight forward, e.g. pirate is (hai3dao4)or sea thief. Note that the word for crisis, (wei1ji1), is often described as combining danger and opportunity Actually this word was imported from Japanese where it was created just the way Chinese words are created, but its real etymology is closer to dangerous time.
Multiple-character words are created by several methods. As in (hai3dao4), the two characters might each contribute meaning which in combination indicates the words meaning. While this pattern is most common, in some cases two characters with essentially identical meanings are combined. For instance ƽ (ping2deng3)means equal, which both ƽ(ping2) and (deng3) mean by themselves. But ƽ(ping2) and (deng3) also have other meanings so combining them narrows down the meaning to the one they share in common. Because of the many homophones in Chinese, this problem is particularly important when a word is just being spoken, not written. Since png is the pronunciation for many characters, not just ƽ(ping2), misunderstandings can be avoided by the two-character word.