About us

JapanDict is an online Japanese dictionary that was created in 2010 with the objective of providing a powerful but simple and easy to use interface to the JMdict dictionary. It was heavily influenced by the simplicity that the popular search engine Google had at the time and the intention was to provide a familiar environment that anyone could use.

JapanDict was created and it's currently maintained with the inestimable help of collaborators and friends by Carles Amigó, a regular guy that after living in Tokyo for a short time, fell in love with the Japanese culture and decided to start this personal project.

Attributions

JapanDict uses many resources publicly available on Internet and some of our own. We would like to thank them for all the time dedicated to create such great content. Without them, this site would not have been possible.

To all of them, we want to say:

ありがとう!

Dictionary files

• JMdict Japanese-Multilingual Dictionary File by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• EDICT Japanese-English Electronic Dictionary File by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• KANJIDIC2 by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• RADKFILE/KRADFILE by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• JLPT vocabulary lists Copyright (c) 2001 Thierry Bézecourt.
• Japanese Language Proficiency Test Resources by Jonathan Waller, licensed under CC BY.
• JLPT data for words and kanji from Tanos project, under CC BY.
• KanjiVG files (c) 2009-2015 Ulrich Apel, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• Tatoeba Project example sentences, licensed under CC BY 2.0, based on Tanaka Corpus by Professor Yasuhito Tanaka, licensed under public domain.
• JmdictFurigana, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
• Japanese Radicals font from the Kanji alive project, licensed under an Apache 2.0 licence granted by Adobe Systems Inc.
• Japanese Pitch accent, braille reading, similar kanji and other data from Kanjium, under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• UniDic Lite, a redistributable package of UniDic 2.1.2 used for Japanese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging, copyright the UniDic Consortium, licensed under the BSD license.

Other resources

• We use Bootstrap for all the frontend part of JapanDict.
• Font Awesome provides us with most of the icons you see in our pages.
• Wikipedia is our primary source of information.
• Twemoji for all the nice emoji icons in the site.
• Draw Me A Kanji library for the kanji drawing animations.
• Illustrations from Freepik Storyset.
• Kanji drawing recognition engine by Kanji canvas. Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Dominik Klein. Copyright (c) 2020 Seth Clyde's dale. Licensed under MIT.
• PyKakasi for the conversion to romaji.
• fugashi by Paul McCann, a Python wrapper for MeCab used to tokenize and analyse Japanese sentences, licensed under the MIT license.
• MeCab, the morphological analysis engine behind our sentence tokenizer, developed by Kyoto University and NTT Communication Science Laboratories, licensed under GPL/LGPL/BSD.
• cutlet by Paul McCann, used to convert Japanese sentences to romaji, licensed under the MIT license.
• Noto Sans by Google, used for roman-character text, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Kosugi Maru by Google, used for kanji/kana text, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

AI-generated content

We are fully transparent about the use of AI on JapanDict. Some content on the site, like some images and a few articles, is generated with the help of AI. Whenever this is the case, it will always be clearly indicated, either through a visible tag or an explicit note in the text. Every piece of AI-generated content is carefully reviewed by a human before being published.

The core dictionary content comes from the sources listed above and is compiled and reviewed by humans, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Last update

• JapanDict database last updated on 2026-09-06.
• JMdict created on 2026-09-05 (see japandict.com/ＪＭｄｉｃｔ).
• KANJIDIC2 created on 2026-09-05.
• Code version: 8ad29c2