By pointing the cursor at a Chinese character the software looks up an English word, and vice versa, working like a dictionary.
Unlike most electronic Chinese dictionaries, characters in Wenlin are defined in terms of the Character Description Language (CDL), an XML specification for describing complex glyphs in East Asian language, developed by the Wenlin Institute.
The software allows the user to display lists of Chinese characters ordered by pinyin, stroke count, frequency, components, or Unicode.
The paid version of the software comes with a small corpus of largely Classical Chinese texts.
The current paid version of the software, called the DELUXE Edition (Chinese: 文林完整版; pinyin: Wénlín Wánzhěngbǎn), is 4.3.2.