The current poll has "Other site" tied for "MDBG" in the lead at 28%. If you picked it, which other site did you mean? I'm curious to know whether there's another big one that's popular, or if it's a bunch of different ones.

Hi nick,
dict.cn.
Its database is superior and I really like its example sentence feature.

In case you try to tackle stuff like Hongloumeng, there is also www.erong.com - in there you find lots of definitions for classical Chinese that are not in a run-of-a-mill dictionary.

爱词霸 - www.iciba.com, it has a lot of random references so it sometimes happens to have a phrase that I can't find a clear definition for when I search the usual dictionaries.

Most of the time, I use www.zdic.net .

I use yellowbridge.com , but haven't really looked at other sites yet.

I selected another site because I there wasn't a choice for dictionary software. I mostly use Plecodict from www.plecodict.com on my Palm Treo 680.

I use mdbg for quick look-up of meaning or to look up by drawing if I don't know pinyin, but I also really like to use http://www.chineseetymology.org/ for, you guessed it, etymology information.

For fast lookup I usually use the Firefox plugin provided by http://www.popupchinese.com/chinese/downloads - a truly great tool!

For details on etymology and character decomposition I turn to www.yellowbridge.com

For example sentences I have used www.dict.cn (in combination with the Firefox plugin), but recently discovered www.nciku.com which fits that purpose even better.

There are indeed quite a few dictionairies around...

I also use plecodict (ABC and Oxford mostly) as my main dictionary. Online I tend to use zhongwen.com

Offline - Wenlin, DEFINITIVELY
Online - NCIKU for character recognition + Wenlin

Pocket: Plecodict for both dictionary and character recognition.

yellowbridge.com is what I use most.

My wife?

Sometimes I use Chinesepod's dictionary for sentence examples.

@faceleg, hahaha! I have this dictionary too, Girlfriend Edition. It's the only dictionary that will talk back to you...

We have solely used yellowbridge for some time. This is without extensive research but it has been successful for character/phrase lookup, etymology, character recognition, and sample sentences (link to dict.cn).

I use dict.cn a lot because it runs very fast inside China & has example sentences, though its database isn't as comprehensive as nciku and lacks character recognition

I use the one include in OSX if I'm on the computer, I have an amazing Electronic dictionary (Besta) for the everyday life and sometime yellowbridge (I don't use dict.cn as they do not support 繁體

For Japanese I use www.jisho.org !

yellowbridge (I'm the other half of the "we" sarac mentioned.)

Online, I usually use the Pinyin Annotator at http://www.annotator.dragonresearch.org/

On the iPhone, I use HippoDict