銘

One single kanji may have more than one different readings. In Japanese, these readings are classified in three different groups: On'yomi, Kun'yomi and Nanori.

On'yomi

The reading is coming from the original Chinese pronunciation of the character. It's commonly used in multi-kanji compound words and usually written in katakana.

Kun'yomi

The reading is coming from the pronunciation of a native Japanese word. Commonly used in words consisting of just one kanji and usually written in hiragana. Where relevant the okurigana is also included separated by 「·」. Readings associated with prefixes and suffixes are marked with 「〜」.

Nanori

The pronunciations found almost exclusively in Japanese names.

Non-Japanese readings

Chinese pinyin

Modern PinYin romanization of the Chinese reading of the kanji. The tones are represented by a concluding digit.

Korean (hangul and romanized)

The Korean readings of the kanji both in hangul and in romanized form. The readings are in the (Republic of Korea) Ministry of Education style of romanization.

Vietnamese

Vietnamese readings of the kanji.

The meanings of the kanji in different languages. These meanings may come from both the On'yomi and the Kun'yomi readings.

In case of differences between languages, the English version prevails.

There are some generic rules to write kanji properly, specifying the order on which each stroke should be written, and although there are some exceptions, these rules apply most of the time.

This section represents in a visual way the stroke order of the kanji. The animation can be stopped, at any time and each step can be manually advanced.

Controls

Most kanji can be decomposed into smaller parts. Those parts are called radicals, and they are often semantic indicators of the meaning of the character.

Extra information about the current kanji. This may include:

Frequency

The 2,501 most-used characters have a ranking which expresses the relative frequency of occurrence of a character in modern Japanese. The data is based on an analysis of word frequencies in the Mainichi Shimbun over 4 years by Alexandre Girardi.

Note:

1. these frequencies are biased towards words and kanji used in newspaper articles
2. the relative frequencies for the last few hundred kanji so graded is quite imprecise

Dictionary indexes

Index number for the current kanji in several published Japanese dictionaries or reference kanji books.

Query codes

These codes contain information relating to the glyph, and can be use for finding a required kanji.

SKIP

The System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns (SKIP) is a scheme for the classification and rapid retrieval of Chinese characters on the basis of geometrical patterns. Developed by Jack Halpern, it first appeared in the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (Kenkyusha, Tokyo 1990; NTC, Chicago 1993), and in successor publications such as the "Kanji Learners Dictionary" (Kodansha 1999,2011) and the "Kodansha Kanji Dictionary" (2013). A description of the coding system is available.

As examples, 割 has a SKIP code of 1-10-2, indicating it is divided into left-right portions with 10 strokes at the left and 2 at the right. 度 has a SKIP code of 3-3-6 indicating it has a 3-stroke enclosure with 6 strokes inside it.

The descriptor codes for The Kanji Dictionary (Tuttle1996)

The descriptor codes for The Kanji Dictionary (Tuttle 1996) by Spahn and Hadamitzky. They are in the form nxnn.n, e.g. 3k11.2, where the kanji has 3 strokes in the identifying radical, it is radical "k" in the SH classification system, there are 11 other strokes, and it is the 2nd kanji in the 3k11 sequence.

Four Corner

The Four Corner coding system was invented by Wang Chen in 1928, it has since then been widely used in dictionaries in China and Japan for classifying kanji and hanzi. In China, it is losing popularity in favour of Pinyin ordering. Some Japanese dictionaries, such as the Morohashi Daikanwajiten have a Four Corner Index. An overview of the coding system is available. In some cases a character may have two of these codes, as it can be a little ambiguous, and Morohashi has some kanji coded differently from their traditional Chinese codes. The coding system indexes characters according to the shapes at the corners.

De Roo Codes

The De Roo codes were developed by Father Joseph De Roo, and published in his book "2001 Kanji" (Bonjinsha). They are based on the shapes observed at the top and bottom of the character. A detailed description is available.

As an example, 亜 has a code of 3273 indicating that the top of the kanji is pattern number 32 (兀) and the bottom pattern number 73 (horizontal line with two vertical strokes above it.

### Encodings

The code of the character in the various character set standards. This may include some of the following:

• JIS X 0208 (1997) kuten coding (nn-nn)
• JIS X 0212 (1990) kuten coding (nn-nn)
• JIS X 0213 (2000) kuten coding (p-nn-nn)
• Unicode 4.0 in hexadecimal coding (4 or 5 digits)

Some text in this section has been extracted from the Kanjidic project