This dictionary contains a total of 4,855 characters selected from the Singapore Students Daily Written Chinese Corpus. The main body contains 4,436 common characters that are arranged according to pinyin, and each character is elaborated with information such as frequency, character formation and frequent words, for readers' easy retrieval. The dictionary also contains two indexes, mainly the Index of Characters Used in Proper Nouns (419 characters), and the Index of Character Components.

This dictionary is a product of a baseline study carried out by SCCL. It is prefaced by Professor Chew Cheng Hai, Professor Lu Jianming and Professor Kim Tse Shek, all of whom acknowledge its positive role in Singapore's Chinese language teaching and even the teaching of Chinese as a mother tongue. With the launch of this dictionary, Singapore Chinese teachers and researchers will have a character list specially compiled for their professional use. It can be further used as a reference for the preparation of teaching and materials, the development of tools for character recognition, and the compilation of Chinese learners' dictionaries.