Chinese

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. adj. Of or relating to China or its peoples, languages, or cultures.
2. n. A native or inhabitant of China.
3. n. A person of Chinese ancestry.
4. n. See Han¹.
5. n. The sole member of the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, consisting of numerous languages and dialects such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Fujian.
6. n. Any of the Sinitic varieties of speech spoken by the Chinese people.
7. n. The official national language of China; Mandarin.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. Of or pertaining to China.
2. n. singular and plural (plural also formerly Chineses). A native or natives of China; specifically, a member or members of the principal indigenous race of China proper, as distinguished from other Mongoloids, such as the Manchus, the present ruling race in the Chinese empire.
3. n. The language of China. It is a monosyllabic tongue, and on this ground is generally classed with the other languages of the same character in southeastern Asia, in Further India and the Himalayas, as constituting the monosyllabic family. It exists in many dialects, of which the so-called Mandarin is the leading and official one. It is composed of only about 500 words, as we should distinguish them in writing, all of them ending in a vowel-sound or in a nasal, although some of the dialects still retain final mutes, lost in Mandarin. This small body of words, however, is raised to 1,500 by differences of the tone of utterance, as rising, falling, even, abrupt, and so on. The language is without inflection, and even without distinction of parts of speech; but words are classed as “full” or “empty,” according as they are used with their full meaning or as auxiliaries in forming phrases: like our will and have in “I will it,” “they have it,” on the one hand, and in “they will have seen it,” on the other. Chinese records go back to about 2000 b. c., and the literature is immense and varied. The mode of writing is by signs that represent each a single word in one of its senses or in a certain set of senses. The signs are of ideographic or hieroglyphic origin; but the greater part of them at present are compound, and many contain a phonetic element along with an ideographic. They number in the dictionaries about 40,000; but only the smaller part of these are in current and familiar use. They are written in perpendicular columns, and the columns follow one another from right to left. The language and mode of writing have been carried to the neighboring nations that have received their culture from China, especially Japan, Corea, and Annam, and have been more or less borrowed or adopted by such nations.

Wiktionary

1. n. Any language spoken in China, especially Literary Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, or Min Nan.
2. n. The class of Sino-Tibetan dialects including Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min Nan and others.
3. n. The logographic writing system shared by this language family.
4. n. Mandarin: the official language of the People's Republic of China
5. n. uncountable The people of China.
6. n. uncountable All people of Chinese descent or self-identity
7. n. countable A person from China or of Chinese descent.
8. n. Chinese food or meal.
9. adj. Of China, its languages or people
10. adj. Unexpected, as used in the phrases Chinese whispers, Chinese burn, Chinese auction.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. Of or pertaining to China; peculiar to China.
2. n. A native or natives of China, or one of that yellow race with oblique eyelids who live principally in China.
3. n. The language of China, which is monosyllabic.

WordNet 3.0

1. adj. of or relating to or characteristic of the island republic on Taiwan or its residents or their language
2. n. a native or inhabitant of Communist China or of Nationalist China
3. adj. of or pertaining to China or its peoples or cultures
4. n. any of the Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in China; regarded as dialects of a single language (even though they are mutually unintelligible) because they share an ideographic writing system