WWWJDIC is an online
Japanese dictionary
have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic d ...
based on the electronic dictionaries compiled and collected by
Australian academic
Jim Breen. The main Japanese–English dictionary file (
EDICT
An edict is a decree or announcement of a law, often associated with monarchism, but it can be under any official authority. Synonyms include "dictum" and "pronouncement".
''Edict'' derives from the Latin edictum.
Notable edicts
* Telepinu Pr ...
) contains over 180,000
entries, and the
ENAMDICT dictionary contains over 720,000
, first names, place names and product names. WWWJDIC also contains several specialized dictionaries covering topics such as life sciences, law, computing, engineering, etc.
For example sentences with Japanese words, WWWJDIC makes use of a sentence database from the
Tatoeba project,
Example Sentence Management System
/ref> largely based on the Tanaka Corpus. Unlike the original Tanaka Corpus, the sentences from the Tatoeba project are not public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...
, but are available under the non-restrictive CC-BY
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...
license. The sentence collection contains over 150,000 sentence pairs in Japanese and English.
In addition to Japanese–English, the dictionary has Japanese paired with German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Swedish, Spanish and Dutch. However, currently there are no example sentences for these languages.
The dictionary is updated freely and may be copied under its own licence arrangements.
Several mirror sites of the main WWWJDIC also exist around the world. These sites update daily from the home site at the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG).
See also
* Japanese language education
References
External links
WWWJDIC
– Main site (EDRDG)
{{Dictionaries of Japanese
Japanese dictionaries
Online dictionaries