Jisho is a powerful Japanese-English dictionary. It lets you find words, kanji, example sentences and more, quickly and easily. The goal is to build a dictionary that helps you understand Japanese. Just paste what you want to understand into Jisho, be it English, romaji, a single word or an entire paragraph of Japanese text, and it will search a myriad of data to help you understand the words, kanji and even grammar patterns.

Jisho is a labor of love for Kim Ahlström and Miwa Ahlström, with immense help from our friends Andrew Plummer, who wrote critical code, Brian Takumi, who created Jisho's logo, and Sophian Bensaou, who has provided invaluable guidance.

Data sources

The data used in Jisho comes from a variety of open source projects. We are immensely thankful to the people who work on these projects and make them available for everyone studying Japanese to benefit from.

JMdict

JMdict, created by Jim Breen and now managed by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG), is a great general dictionary with roughly 170 000 entries and is actively maintained by Jim Breen and a team of volunteers. This dictionary file is the source of the bulk of the words in Jisho.

KANJIDIC2

KANJIDIC2, also from Jim Breen/EDRDG, is a database of kanji that includes readings, meanings and a lot of metadata around kanji like lookup numbers for kanji dictionary books, stroke count and information about variant forms.

RADKFILE and KRADFILE

RADKFILE and KRADFILE, also from Jim Breen/EDRDG, is a database of the radicals that make up kanji. This is used to drive the radical lookup feature in Jisho.

Jreibun

Jisho uses high quality example sentences from the Jreibun project. These sentences are created by professional teachers of Japanese, and translated into English by experienced translators. The project is currently in the early phases, and as of February 2023 there are 407 sentences from Jreibun available on Jisho, with more to come.

Wes Robertson (Scripting Japan) — Living Japanese Slang Dictionary

The slang dictionary definitions come from Wes Robertson's fantastic Living Japanese Slang Dictionary. These entries link to blog posts where Wes dives deep into etymology and meaning. Please also check out Wes' YouTube page where he makes entertaining videos about Japanese slang.

Tatoeba (Tanaka corpus)

Most example sentences in Jisho come from the Tatoeba project, which got them from a large collection of sentences compiled by Professor Yasuhito Tanaka at Hyogo University and his students, and later extensively edited by Jim Breen.

KanjiVG

Stroke order data for kanji come from the excellent KanjiVG project, by Ulrich Apel and several contributors.

DBpedia

Jisho includes articles from Wikipedia that have both a Japanese article and a corresponding English article. The data source for this is the fantastic DBpedia project.

Jonathan Waller‘s JLPT Resources page

Information about what word and kanji belong to which JLPT level comes from Jonathan Waller‘s JLPT Resources page.

WaniKani audio

Audio files in Jisho have been graciously provided by the awesome people at Tofugu from their sweet kanji learning application WaniKani.

UniDic

UniDic is a Short Word Unit dictionary for MeCab created by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). It is the source for pitch accent information in Jisho.

Jōyō Kanji Standard

The Jōyō Kanji Standard, published by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, determines what kanji should be taught at which age in school, and what readings students learn for each kanji. This jōyō reading information for kanji in Jisho comes from this standard.

Open source contributions

We have made parts of Jisho.org available as open source when we think it would benefit the community.

Ve

Jisho.org uses MeCab to parse Japanese. In order to make it easier to use Kim has developed a Ruby wrapper library called Ve.