About

A free Japanese⇔English dictionary — a public service. We take no credit for the dictionary data. All credit belongs to the people who created and maintain the actual work.

This site is the modern successor to Jeffrey Friedl's long-running mirror of Jim Breen's WWWJDIC (1996–2025).

Credits

Jeffrey Friedl: Created the original Japanese⇔English Dictionary Server on June 30, 1994 at Carnegie Mellon University. Developed the CGI technology, GIF text rendering, and the quasi-HTML template system that powered the server for decades.
William F. Maton Sotomayor: Took over maintenance from Jeffrey Friedl in 1999 and has maintained and developed the dictionary server for over 23 years. Key contributions include: UTF-8 encoding support (2007), JIS-X-0212 and JIS-X-0213 kanji support with custom bitmap fonts, vertical font rendering from Sazanami Truetype fonts, automatic data updates from EDRDG master feeds, the user customization system, and specialized dictionaries including chemical terms, manufacturing terms, and environmental glossary. Still maintains live mirrors at rut.org (New Jersey, USA) and xolotl.wfms.org (Switzerland). Contact: wfms@wfms.org.
Jim Breen and Contributors: Created and maintain the foundational dictionary projects: JMdict/EDICT (Japanese-English word dictionary), JMnedict/ENAMDICT (Japanese proper names), KANJIDIC2 (kanji character database), and WWWJDIC (the original web interface). Decades of collaborative work by hundreds of contributors.
Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG): Manages and distributes the dictionary files. All data is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
Tatoeba Project: Provides the Japanese-English example sentence pairs shown on word detail pages.

Origin Story

June 13, 1994 — Jeffrey Friedl first saw a web browser (Mosaic for X Window System)
June 15, 1994 — Wrote to a friend: "After playing with the [Xerox PARC] map server, I thought it might be cool to provide a Japanese⇔English dictionary the same way."
June 16, 1994 — Scrounged up the GIF standard, wrote Perl scripts to generate Japanese text as images, modified his lookup program to run as a background server
June 23, 1994 — Had a working version ready for public
June 30, 1994 — First successful lookup, ~11am JST, hosted at Carnegie Mellon University
May 13, 1995 — First public announcement via USENet (sci.lang.japan)
CMU era — 280,258 total accesses before accounts expired
1996–1999 — Mirror network grew: Canada (William Maton), England, Japan (G-square/Tokyo), Sweden (Lund University)
1999 — Jeffrey handed off maintenance to William Maton
December 2007 — Eri Takase and Takase Studios, LLC provided web space for the gokanji.com mirror. "Special thanks once again to Eri Takase and Takase Studios, LLC." — original change log
2007–2022 — William continued active development: added dictionaries, Unicode support, font systems, auto-updates
October 2022 — Most recent update to CGI software
2026 — Modern rebuild by Takase Studios, honoring the original interface philosophy

Mirror Network

This dictionary is part of a mirror network providing community access to EDRDG data:

gokanji.com — this server
rut.org — New Jersey, USA
xolotl.wfms.org — Switzerland

Official WWWJDIC servers: edrdg.org · wwwjdic.se · wwwjdic.biz

Data Sources

JMdict — ~215,000 Japanese-English word entries with readings, meanings, and part of speech
JMnedict — ~743,000 Japanese proper name entries with type classifications
KANJIDIC2 — ~12,000 kanji with readings, meanings, stroke counts, and grade levels
RADKFILE — Radical decomposition data for multi-radical kanji lookup
Tatoeba Corpus — ~150,000 Japanese-English sentence pairs

Eri Takase and Takase Studios, LLC

Provided web space for the gokanji.com mirror since December 2007. In 2026, rebuilt gokanji.com as a modern web application using EDRDG open data, preserving the interface philosophy that made the original valuable.

Source data via jmdict-simplified. Comments appreciated.