Ch??nôm Dictionary
by James Campbell

Ch??nôm Dictionary
A Sino-Viê?t Character Reference

Here you can look up about 4000 Ch??nôm Characters, either by pronunciation or by radical.

When are Ch??nôm Characters used? Actually they are not used anymore but some texts still exist. The information here is provided as a reference. Normally Ch??nôm are used for those words in Vietnamese that are of non-Sinitic origin or for which no Chinese character could be assigned. Originally, these words could not be written with Chinese characters, so the inventors of these characters decided to give each Vietnamese word, based on its sound, a phonetic character from Chinese, and then compound it with another Chinese character that represented the meaning. There are many characters among Chinese languages and dialects that follow the same principle, most notably in Cantonese. Even Mandarin has a large number of characters peculiar to its speech originally not found in ancient dictionaries and coined in much the same way. The principle with Ch??nôm is the same but taken to a much further extent. For more information, I recommend Omniglot's informative site. Here, for example are the Vietnamese numbers one to million:

m?t (mô?t) = 1	hai = 2	h?m = ?	ba = 3	b?m = ?
b?n = 4	n?m = 5	l?m = as in 15	nh?m = after m??i as in 25, 35, 45 ...	sa?u = 6
b?y = 7	ta?m = 8	chín = 9	m??i = 10	m??i = ~0 (multiple of ten)
OR ch?c = ~0 (multiple of ten)	tr?m = 100	nghìn = 1000	triê?u = 1,000,000 (this is a Chinese character, not a Ch??nôm character)

For any native Vietnamese word you want to know the character for, you can probably find here. If not, it might not have a character or is extremely rare.

Alphabetical List of Nôm characters: (not strict alphabetical order: a, ?, â with tone marks are not treated as separate letters, neither are ?, u, or d, ?, etc.)

List of Ch?? Nôm Characters by Radical