Pinyin Converter
Convert Chinese characters to pinyin with tone marks, numbers or plain.
Pinyin Converter online
Convert Chinese text into pinyin with tone marks — 汉字 becomes hànzì — for learners, teachers and anyone preparing reading material, labels or names.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste Chinese text into the input box.
- Click Convert. The pinyin library loads on first use (a second or two), then the transcription appears.
- Copy the pinyin from the result panel.
Common uses
Annotating study materials and children's readers, preparing name pronunciations for a meeting or a classroom roll, labelling products and signage for international visitors, and checking the reading of an unfamiliar character in context.
How it works
Conversion is done by the pinyin-pro library, loaded on demand from a CDN with integrity checking. It works from a full dictionary with word-level segmentation, so polyphonic characters are resolved by the word they sit in — 行 is háng in 银行 and xíng in 行走 — most of the time; rare words and names can still pick the common reading over the correct one. Non-Chinese characters (Latin letters, digits, punctuation) pass through untouched, and the output carries tone marks (ā á ǎ à) rather than tone numbers.
Worked example
中国银行，我来了 converts to zhōng guó yín háng, wǒ lái le — note 银行 read as the word yínháng, not as the character-by-character yín xíng. And in 重庆, the library gives chóng qìng, the correct reading of the city's name, where a naive character table would produce zhòng. Word-aware conversion earns its keep exactly on these famous traps.
Privacy and browser processing
Conversion runs in your browser; only the pinyin library file is fetched from a CDN — your text is never uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Why did a name get the "wrong" reading?
Some characters in personal and place names use rare or historical readings （单 as a surname is Shàn, not dān; 曾 as a surname is Zēng). The library applies the statistically common word reading; surnames and literary readings may need a manual correction after conversion.
Does it output tone numbers (han4 zi4) instead of marks?
This page uses tone marks, the form learners and publications standardise on. If your system needs numbered pinyin (some input-method and database conventions), the conversion has to happen in tooling with that output option.
What happens to mixed text?
Latin words, numbers and punctuation pass through as-is, so a sentence like "我在 Apple Store 买了 iPhone" converts its Chinese runs and leaves the English standing — convenient for bilingual documents.
Why did the first conversion take a moment?
The dictionary library (about a megabyte) loads on first use from a public CDN, verified by an integrity hash. After that, conversions in the same session are instant.
Is my text uploaded?
Conversion runs in your browser once the library is loaded; your text is never sent to a server. Only the library file itself is fetched, as with any web page asset.