The Wenlin project began in 1987, when Wenlin's founder and president, Tom Bishop, started developing software for learning Chinese and after a few years made prototypes available for field-testing at a number of universities. Elisabeth Ranjhan, Mark Roblee, and Richard Cook joined the project in the mid 1990s. We released Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese in 1997.

Meanwhile, in 1990 Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania forged an agreement with a number of widely dispersed scholars to compile an alphabetically based Chinese-English dictionary. This was the genesis of the ABC Dictionary project. In 1992,

John DeFrancis, a distinguished scholar of Chinese at the University of Hawaii (UH), became the chief editor. (DeFrancis had already formulated the essential idea of the dictionary many decades earlier in his 1949 book, Nationalism and Language Reform in China.) The project was hosted by the UH Center for Chinese Studies, whose Associate Director, Prof. Cynthia Ning, became one of the Editorial Associates. Grants were provided by the US Department of Education, the UH Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development, and others. The ABC Chinese-English Dictionary was first published by UH Press in book form in 1996. The relationship between Wenlin and the ABC projects began in 1997. Wenlin Institute and the University of Hawaii made a licensing agreement to combine the ABC Dictionary in electronic form with the Wenlin software. In 1998, Wenlin version 2 was published. It included the original ABC Dictionary. Bishop joined the ABC team, which, still under the leadership of DeFrancis, was hard at work on an enlarged and improved version of the dictionary. Wenlin and ABC became increasingly related, to the extent that they can now be considered in many respects as a unified project.

In the 21st century we've gone on to produce and publish more dictionaries, including: the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive edition, with over 200,000 entries; the bidirectional ABC English-Chinese/Chinese-English Dictionary, edit by John DeFrancis and Zhang Yanyin; the ABC Dictionary of Proverbs (Yànyǔ) edited by John Rohsenow; and more software, including: Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese, version 4, and an innovative technology called CDL.