The KANJIDIC Home Page

## The Home Page of the

# KANJIDIC/KANJD212

## Project

The following is summary information about KANJIDIC and KANJD212 Kanji database files. For complete documentation, see the kanjidic and kanjd212 documentation files.

Introduction

The KANJIDIC file contains comprehensive information about Japanese kanji. It is a text file with one line for each of the 6,355 kanji specified in the JIS X 0208-1990 set, plus a header line. (For information about this set, see Appendix A of the documentation file.)

The KANJD212 file is also a text file containing comprehensive information about the 5,801 kanji in the JIS X 0212-1990 supplementary character set.

The files have been compiled and maintained by Jim Breen, and were cited as references used in the compilation of the new edition of the Nelson character dictionary.

KANJIDIC2

The KANJIDIC2 file, which is an XML-format version of the data in KANJIDIC and KANJD212 is now available. The KANJIDIC2 page is here.

Is it Public Domain?

KANJIDIC, KANJD212 and KANJIDIC2 can be freely used provided satisfactory acknowledgement is made in any software product, server, etc. that uses them. There are a few other conditions relating to distributing copies of the files with or without modification. Copyright is vested in the EDRG (Electronic Dictionary Research Group). You can see the specific licence statement at the Group's site.

The files are available from the Monash University ftp site here and here.

The information about each kanji consists of:

- coding information about the kanji: including its identification in various code-sets (JIS, Unicode), and identifying codes derived from its structure (radical, stroke-count, Four-Corner, SKIP);
- lexicographic information about the kanji: pronunciations and meanings;
- indexing information providing identification of the kanji in several major dictionaries and reference books.

KANJIDIC is used now to build the kinfo.dat file which is used by JDIC, JREADER, WinJDic and JWPce. kinfo.dat contains the identical information, but in a compressed form and in a structure suitable for fast indexed access. KANJIDIC is also used in its native format by the xjdic and MacJDic dictionary programs, the WWWJDIC server, and a growing number of other programs such as KDRILL and KDIC.

The files contains a mixture of ASCII characters and kana/kanji encoded using the EUC (Extended Unix Code) coding. The following is an example (folded) of one of the entry lines in KANJIDIC; the kanji with the meaning "east".

Apart from the first two fields, the information fields in each entry have an identifying capital letter. The fields in the sample entry are:

- the kanji itself;
- the JIS code of the kanji in hexadecimal;
- [U] the Unicode/ISO 10646 code of the kanji in hexadecimal;
- [N] the index in Nelson (Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary)
- [B] the classification radical number of the kanji (as in Nelson);
- [C] the "classical" radical number (where this differs from the one used in Nelson);
- [S] the total stroke-count of the kanji;
- [G] the "grade" of the kanji, In this case, G2 means it is a Jouyou (general use) kanji taught in the second year of elementary schooling in Japan;
- [H] the index in Halpern (New Japanese-English Character Dictionary);
- [F] the rank-order frequency of occurrence of the kanji in Japanese;
- [P] the "SKIP" coding of the kanji, as used in Halpern;
- [K] the index in the Gakken Kanji Dictionary (A New Dictionary of Kanji Usage);
- [L] the index in Heisig (Remembering The Kanji);
- [I] the index in the Spahn & Hadamitsky dictionary.
- [Q] the Four-Corner code;
- [MN,MP] the index and page number in the 13-volume Morohashi "DaiKanWaJiten";
- [E] the index in Henshall (A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters);
- [Y] the PinYin (Chinese) pronunciation(s) of the kanji;
- the Japanese pronunciations or "readings" of the kanji. These are in the katakana script for "ON" (i.e of Chinese origin) readings, and hiragana for "KUN" (Japanese origin) readings. Thus

  is the ON reading, and

  is the KUN reading. These are optionally followed by a "T" plus one or more "nanori", which are the special readings only used with proper names.

- Finally, the meanings associated with the kanji, each encapsulated with {...}.

KANJIDIC is available from a number of ftp archive sites around the world. The master site is Monash University's Nihongo FTP Archive archive, where it is available in .zip and .gz compression. The "kinfo.dat" file is in the kinfo26.zip archive.

If you want to explore KANJIDIC using the Web, try my WWWJDIC server, which supports both KANJIDIC and KANJD212. If you don't have a browser with Japanese support, you can use a portal which provides graphics of the Japanese characters.

Other Languages

The Spanish version of KANJIDIC, with Spanish meanings translated by Francisco Gutierrez. It can be downloaded here or here. (It also is in UTF8 coding.)

There is also a partial French version prepared by Alain Thierion available here

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