Tone colors

Many electronic dictionaries color-code characters according to their tones. The jury is still out on how helpful this really is, but there are a number of different color schemes to choose from.

Existing Color Schemes

	1st Tone	2nd Tone	3rd Tone	4th Tone	Neutral Tone
Dummit	red	orange	green	light blue	(none)
Pleco	red	green	blue	purple	gray
Sinosplice	orange	green	blue	red	gray
Hanping	light blue	green	orange	red	gray
MDBG	red	orange	green	blue	black

Sources and further reading

Books

• Chinese Through Tone & Color (Chinese Edition)

Websites

• Sinosplice: Tone and Color in Chinese
• Laowai Chinese: Tone Colors and What Pleco Did with Them
• Zydeo blog: Color temperature of Mandarin tones