China’s Nciku shuts down, redirects users to LINE dictionary

Over the weekend, Chinese language learners looking for their favorite dictionary got greeted by a bunny instead.

Nciku, a popular online Chinese-English dictionary, now redirects to linedictionary.naver.com, the web version of Line’s Chinese-English Dictionary. Users who land on the site for the first time are shown a message informing them that Nciku is now ‘out of service’ and will be replaced by LINE Dictionary.



According to a Forbes piece from 2008, NHN launched Nciku as an early play at a launching a global-facing product. Before that, the company had positioned itself as a leader in Korea’s search engine space, but hadn’t yet cracked any foreign markets. Six years later, NHN’s channel for reaching users abroad is Line, the mobile messaging app that’s big in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and parts of South America.

Line has English-Chinese, English-Thai, and English-Indonesian dictionaries in its mobile suite. The new web version of Line Dictionary nee Nciku looks like an import of its corresponding mobile app. There’s no input fields handwriting – a must-have for any online Chinese-English dictionary – but the notice says it’s coming soon.

Chinese language learners stick with dictionaries like smokers stick with cigarette brands, and Nciku had its fair share of loyalists. Despite its long loading times and frequent crashes, it still had legions of defenders – including this writer, who saw the notice and wanted to cry.

Should we expect a new-and-improved Nciku under the Line brand? Or should we begin mourning? As evidenced by the work of Mike Love, founder of Pleco, building a dictionary that services (and monetizes on top of) the needs of hardcore Mandarin learners is a labor intensive but lucrative endeavor. For a big company like NHN, the returns on such an investment might not be high enough. But as long as Line Dictionary licenses the same dictionaries as Nciku, casual Nciku users ought to endure the transition just fine.

We’ve reached out to Line to ask about the future of Nciku and will update this piece if we hear back.

The death of Nciku isn’t the only loss Chinese language learners have suffered recently – Shooter.cn, a popular website “offering” Chinese subtitles for international films, closed its doors last week.