NEW!:
Introduction
The KANJIDIC file contains comprehensive information about Japanese kanji. It is a text file currently 6,353 lines long, with one line for each kanji in the two levels of the characters specified in the JIS X 0208-1990 set. (For information about this set, see Appendix A of the documentation file.)
The KANJD212 file contains 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.
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) here at Monash University. 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:
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:
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.
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.