When searching by Pinyin, you must include a space between the different pinyin syllables. You can include or exclude tone numbers (1-4 and 5 for the neutral tone).

When searching by English, searches are not case sensitive. Since this is designed mainly as a Chinese-to-English and not an English-to-Chinese dictionary, if you can't find the word you are looking for, you may be able to find it using a synonym. Also, you may get many unrelated entries that use the word in the English definition but do not give the equivalent Chinese for it.