中文
zhōng wén
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Chinese, the language, especially in its written form. In daily conversation people use it for the spoken language too, just like 汉语: 你会说中文吗? 'can you speak Chinese?'. 文 means 'writing, written language', and the same pattern names other languages: 英文 'English', 日文 'Japanese'.
Tiếng Trung, nhất là chữ viết và văn bản tiếng Trung. Trong đời thường, từ này dùng chẳng khác gì 汉语, kể cả khi nói: 你会说中文吗? (bạn có biết nói tiếng Trung không?). 文 là “văn, chữ viết”; tên các thứ tiếng khác cũng ghép như vậy: 英文 (tiếng Anh), 日文 (tiếng Nhật).
NounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 063 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “中文” mean?
Chinese, the language, especially in its written form. In daily conversation people use it for the spoken language too, just like 汉语: 你会说中文吗? 'can you speak Chinese?'. 文 means 'writing, written language', and the same pattern names other languages: 英文 'English', 日文 'Japanese'. Literally: writing of China
Is “中文” formal or informal?
中文 is generally neutral.