Human ingenuity always finds a way. In Chinese dictionaries, there are simply multiple indices: you can look up characters by pronunciation (if you know the wor

Human ingenuity always finds a way. In Chinese dictionaries, there are simply multiple indices: you can look up characters by pronunciation (if you know the word but not how to write it) or by shape (if you know the character but not how to say it). The latter works because there is a small set of shapes (“radicals”) that are combined to produce new characters.