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Mythic Mandarin

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.

顺带一提

  • shùn dài yī tí by the way Simplified 顺带一提 · Traditional 順帶一提

Dictionary entry for 顺带一提

顺

  • shùn to obey; to follow
  • 9 strokes
  • Traditional form: 順

Stroke by stroke

带

  • dài band; belt
  • 9 strokes
  • Traditional form: 帶

Stroke by stroke

一

  • yī one; single
  • 1 stroke

Stroke by stroke

提

  • dī used in 提防[di1 fang5] and 提溜[di1 liu5]
  • tí to carry (hanging down from the hand); to lift
  • 12 strokes

Stroke by stroke

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

  1. Top before bottom.
  2. Left before right.
  3. Horizontal before vertical when the two strokes cross.
  4. Left-falling stroke before right-falling stroke.
  5. Outside before inside, and close a box last: write the frame, then the inside, then the bottom stroke that closes it.
  6. 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.

Read the words in context in our stories

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).