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Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group

Welcome to the Wiki of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group. The Wiki is being developed as a repository of information and documentation about the Group's projects.

The JMdict/EDICT Project

This project is to build a freely-usable general Japanese dictionary file. It began in 1991 with the EDICT Japanese-English file in a simple format, and in 1999 expanded into the XML-format JMdict file. From then the file has been maintained by Jim Breen in a mark-up system from which the JMdict file, in both English and multiple-language editions, the EDICT file, and the extended EDICT2 file have been generated. Public input into the project has been mainly via WWW forms incorporated in the WWWJDIC server. A new edition of the files have been generated daily

In May 2010 maintenance of the JMdict master file moved to an online JMdict Database (JMdictDB) system developed by Stuart McGraw. Full operation of this system is planned for June 2010.

Some useful links are:

The Tanaka Corpus

This project is to maintain and extend the Tanaka Corpus which is a large collection of parallel Japanese/English sentence pairs.

The Corpus is now maintained within the Tatoeba Project. This project has extended the file to include many other languages, and many sentences are available in three or more languages. The project WWW site has extensive facilities for searching and editing the sentences, and has an active community of people entering and editing sentences.

The KANJIDIC Project

The KANJIDIC project has compiled files of data on kanji used in Japanese text processing. The files cover the kanji in three Japanese standards:

  • JIS X 0208-1998, which includes 6,355 kanji.
  • JIS X 0212-1990, which includes extra 5,801 kanji
  • JIS X 0213-2004, which extends JIS X 0208, overlaps with some of JIS X 0212, and adds 884 extra kanji.

Three data files are distributed by this project:

The COMPDIC Project

The COMPDIC project compiled a glossary of terms used in the computing and telecommunications industries. It is in the "EDICT" format. See the brief documentation.

The ENAMDICT/JMnedict Project

The ENAMDICT file contains about 720,000 proper names in Japanese. It is in EDICT format, with some special tags to indicate the type of proper name. It is also available in XML format as the Japanese-Multilingual named entity dictionary (JMnedict).There is a basic documentation page.

The KRADFILE/RADKFILE Project

This project provides a decomposition of kanji into a number of visual elements or radicals to support software which provides a lookup service using kanji components.

There is an information page about the files.


The WWWJDIC Dictionary Server

  • Common words - the 850 common words from Ogden's list. To be used to enhance English-Japanese lookups.

Mailing List

There is a mailing list for people engaged in the EDRDG projects.

How Can I Help?

From time to time people ask how they can best contribute to the projects. There are many ways of assisting, the main ones being:

  • adding to and enhancing the main (EDICT/JMdict) dictionary file. This is best done by using the New Entry/Amendment page of WWWJDIC.
  • adding extra Japanese-English sentence pairs to the collection based on the Tanaka Corpus. There is a New Examples function in WWWJDIC for this.
  • assisting with the translation of the WWWJDIC interface into other languages. At present the priority is to make it fully available in Japanese. See the WWWJDIC in Japanese page.
  • work through the lists of words Paul Blay has place on the Talk:Tanaka_Corpus page, which could become new dictionary entries.
  • join and participate in the mailing list for people engaged in the EDRDG projects.