We present the Chinese Lexical Database (CLD): a large-scale lexical database for simplified Chinese. The CLD provides a wealth of lexical information for 3913 one-character words, 34,233 two-character words, 7143 three-character words, and 3355 four-character words, and is publicly available through http://www.chineselexicaldatabase.com . For each of the 48,644 words in the CLD, we provide a wide range of categorical predictors, as well as an extensive set of frequency measures, complexity measures, neighborhood density measures, orthography-phonology consistency measures, and information-theoretic measures. We evaluate the explanatory power of the lexical variables in the CLD in the context of experimental data through analyses of lexical decision latencies for one-character, two-character, three-character and four-character words, as well as word naming latencies for one-character and two-character words. The results of these analyses are discussed.