Input
Result
The result will appear here.Many characters have more than one reading — 行 is háng in 银行 and xíng in 行走, 重 is chóng in 重庆 and zhòng in 重要 — so a dictionary lookup per character gets a lot of text wrong. This converter uses pinyin-pro, which splits the text into words before choosing a reading, so common words come out right. Beyond plain pinyin it writes URL slugs for Chinese titles, first-letter initials for search indexes, pinyin in brackets after each character, and a list of every polyphone it met with the readings it did not choose, so you can check them.
How it works
- Tones can be written as marks (zhōng), numbers (zhong1) or left out; ü can be written as v, the way it is typed on a keyboard.
- The slug output lower-cases, drops tones and joins syllables with hyphens — 世界 becomes shi-jie — ready for a URL.
- Initials give the first letter of each syllable, such as zhrmghg for 中华人民共和国, which search boxes use for quick matching.
- Surname mode reads the first character as a family name, where readings differ: 单 is shàn as a surname, not dān.
Where your data goes
Nowhere. This tool runs entirely in your browser: the text you paste is processed by the page and is never transmitted to a server or written to a log.
This tool is free and needs no account. Its results exist only in your open page and are not saved anywhere.
What it costs
This tool is free, with no sign-in and no points.
Common questions
- How accurate are the readings?
- Good for common words, not perfect. Readings are chosen from a word dictionary, so a polyphone inside a known word comes out right, but one that depends on grammar can go wrong — pinyin-pro reads the 还 in 还钱 (to repay) as hái instead of huán, and 长得 as cháng dé. Switch the output to the polyphone list to see each ambiguous character with its alternatives before you rely on the result.
- Why does the slug use v for ü?
- Because ü is not safe in a URL and dropping the dots would merge different syllables: 女 nǚ would become nu, the same as 怒 nù. Writing v, as pinyin keyboards do, keeps them apart — 女儿 becomes nv-er.
- What happens to English words and numbers?
- They are kept as they are. In spaced output a space is put between a syllable and a neighbouring Latin word, and punctuation stays attached to the text before it, so a sentence mixing Chinese and English remains readable.
The open-source behind it
This tool runs on zh-lx/pinyin-pro, released under MIT. If you need the same behaviour inside your own program, that is the library to reach for.
zh-lx/pinyin-proAlso known as
- chinese to pinyin
- pinyin converter
- hanzi to pinyin
- pinyin with tone marks
- chinese to pinyin slug
- 汉字转拼音