Chinese Stroke Order Dictionary
Stroke order is the sequence in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. Search any word by characters, pinyin or English, watch each character being written stroke by stroke, then practise it yourself.
沿途
- yán tú along the sides of the road; by the wayside
沿
- yán along; to follow (a line, tradition etc)
- 8 strokes
Stroke by stroke
途
- tú way; route
- 10 strokes
Stroke by stroke
Practise the whole word
Write each character in its box. A hint appears after a few wrong strokes.
Why stroke order matters
Writing the strokes in the usual order makes characters faster to write, better balanced and easier to remember, because the same patterns repeat across thousands of characters. It also helps you read handwriting, where strokes often run into each other.
Basic stroke order rules
- Top before bottom.
- Left before right.
- Horizontal before vertical when the two strokes cross.
- Left-falling stroke before right-falling stroke.
- Outside before inside, and close a box last: write the frame, then the inside, then the bottom stroke that closes it.
- Middle before the two sides in a symmetrical character.
These rules describe the usual order, and some characters are exceptions. The animations follow the open Make Me a Hanzi stroke data; for a small number of characters its order can differ from the official mainland standard or from Taiwanese or Japanese practice.
How to practise
Watch the animation once, write the character along with the outline, then turn the outline off and write it from memory. Practising the whole word, not single characters, helps you remember it the way you will meet it in a story.
Dictionary data: CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0). Stroke data: Hanzi Writer data, derived from Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License). Animation: Hanzi Writer (MIT licence).