How are your dictionaries made? Hanzi to Hanzi? Pinyin to Hanzi?
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In a normal modern Chinese dictionary, there are two different index system, one is by referring a specific character to its respective sound (pinyin), the other is by referring to its capital morphological structure (or what we call pian-pang-bu-shou), for generally speaking, a common Chinese character can be split into 2 parts or more, for those with 2 parts, one part decides the sound, the other part its meaning (semantic connotation). E.g., 猪(zhu1) can be split into left part, which is a simplied structure for 犬(canis, dog, theriac, beastial, relating to animal, esp. a mammal), and the right part, which indicates the writer the character reads alike with 者(zhe3)。
For the contents of an entry in a dictionary, surely, hanzi to hanzi.
