Faculty of Computing and Information Technology
Department of Robotics and Digital Technology
Technical Report 93/13

A Japanese Electronic Dictionary Project (Part 1:
The Dictionary Files)
J. W. Breen
November 30, 1993

Enquiries:Technical Report Coordinator
Robotics and Digital Technology
Monash University
Clayton VIC 3168
Australia
tr.coord@rdt.monash.edu.au+61 3 565 3402

Contents
Abstract and Keywords
1 Introduction

1.1 Project Overview
1.2 Japanese Orthography and Text Processing

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3: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :2 Japanese - English Dictionaries
3 The Main Dictionary File
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4

The EDICT File
File Structure
Lexicographic Details
File Compilation

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7: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :4 The Character Dictionary File
4.1 Character File Structure
4.2 Character File Compilation

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3

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8
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10

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: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :5 Copyright Issues
6 Conclusion
7 Acknowledgements
A The Japanese Writing System
B Japanese Text Processing
C The Unicode Coding System

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14

15
17
18
19
21
23

1

Abstract
Electronic multi-lingual dictionaries have seen considerable development in the last decade.
The standardization of coding systems for the orthography of many Asian languages inthe same period, combined with the increased availability of low-cost micro-electronicstorage and display systems has opened up considerable demand and potential for dictionary systems in these languages. This report describes an on-going project to develop andmaintain a comprehensive electronic Japanese-English dictionary capable of use withina variety of search-and-display, electronic-text reading support, and machine translation
environments. The project les are being developed in the public domain. The dictionary
les have, at the time of writing, attained the status of being the major freely available
electronic repository of Japanese-English dictionary material in the world.

Keywords
dictionary, lexicography, Japan, JIS, WNN, SKK, kanji, hiragana, katakana, Unicode2Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1 Project Overview
This paper describes an on-going project to develop and maintain a comprehensive electronic Japanese-English dictionary capable of use within a variety of search-and-display,electronic-text reading support, and machine translation environments. The project les
are being developed in the public domain. The project, which was initiated and coordinated by the author, has been assisted by the volunteer labour of many people who haveselected, translated, formatted and edited material for the dictionary.
The dictionary les developed in the project consist of:
1. EDICT, the main dictionary le of Japanese words with their pronunciations andEnglish translations;
2. KANJIDIC, a le of explanatory information and indices for the 6,353 kanji characters in the JIS Level 1 and 2 character sets described in the JIS X 0208-1990
standard.
The EDICT and KANJIDIC les have, at the time of writing, attained the statusof being the major freely available electronic repository of Japanese-English dictionary
material in the world, and are being used by thousands of researchers, teachers andstudents via a large number of software packages which have been developed to use orincorporate them. The EDICT le now has approximately 70,000 entries, of which some
30,000 are Japanese proper names.
An adjunct to the development of the dictionary les is the development of software
which accesses and displays the material in a variety of contexts. An additional paper
is in preparation which describes a number of software systems developed by the author
and others to carry out this task.

1.2 Japanese Orthography and Text Processing
The Japanese language has a unique system of orthography which poses particular challenges to both computer text processing and the lexicographer. This paper assumes on
the part of the reader an elementary knowledge of Japanese orthography, an overview of3

which is included in Appendix A. For a fuller description of the Japanese writing systems,
the reader is directed to an introductory text such as Neustupny [1], or O'Neill[2]. An
overview is also in Unger [3] and a more historical treatment in Seeley [4].
The ability to store and process the many thousands of characters used in Japaneseorthography is central to an electronic dictionary system. A basic knowledge of themechanisms used to store and process Japanese characters is assumed in this paper. An
overview of the coding systems is included in Appendix B, and the reader is referred to
Lunde [5] for a thorough treatment of the subject.

4

Chapter 2
Japanese - English Dictionaries
Japanese dictionaries take two general forms. The rst is a word-oriented dictionary of theform found in most languages. Such dictionaries are a lexically ordered set of entries, eachof which begins with a head-word and contains synonyms, explanations, etc. In Japanese,such dictionaries usually have their headwords in kana, and are ordered according to thestandard gojuon 1 order. Both katakana and hiragana headwords are used, and are treatedas equal for the purpose of ordering. There are literally hundreds of such dictionaries inprint and use in Japan. The major and most authoritative is the kojien [6] (]w1), whichis the Oxford English Dictionary of Japanese dictionaries.
The second form of dictionary, the character dictionary, is unique to languages such as
Chinese and Japanese, which use non-phonetic symbols. Japanese character dictionaries,
known as kanwajiten (wM: Chinese-Japanese dictionary), typically have the charactersgrouped by radical, that is, an identi able element of the character, usually occurring at
the left or top of the character. Within each radical group, characters are ordered bystroke count; either the total number of strokes, or the number of strokes excluding theindex radical. The radicals used for this purpose are usually based on the 214 classicalradicals of Chinese orthography. Use of such a dictionary requires some skill and practicein both identifying the index radical and counting the strokes that comprise the character.
Often a separate index is available which enables each character to be found by either its
on or kun reading. The information in each entry typically includes the full set of on andkun readings, the meaning(s) associated with the character and a selection of the major
compounds which begin with the character. Larger dictionaries also include the major
variants of the character and some etymological information.
Again, there are many kanwajiten in use in Japan. The major reference dictionary is
the 13-volume Morohashi daikanwajiten (ewM)[7].
Dictionaries which combine Japanese with another language such as English obviously
need to have sections or parts which cover both Japanese-English and English-Japanese.
They fall into two groups: those prepared for Japanese speakers and those prepared forEnglish speakers. There are many dictionaries in the rst group, and relatively few in thesecond. The reason for the existence of the two groups of dictionaries lies with the natureof written Japanese. Without at least familiarity with the kana, and in many cases a large
number of the joyo kanji, dictionaries prepared for the Japanese domestic market are of
10eY: fty sounds. The standard 5 by 10 table of kana which is usually used for syllable ordering.
5

little use to non-speakers of Japanese. The following examples from two such dictionaries
illustrate this point:

universe n. 1 gD (cosmos). 2 H5, O+H, m(1mc)Hc. 3 f" (world);(V2@) JOZ(H1 ), T1F (all mankind), etc. etc. [8]and1md .#/ a trial. 7HbcIZ!B: the case is under (on) trial. [9]Dictionaries prepared for those with limited Japanese reading skills usually rely on
the use of romaji, particularly in the headwords. As such dictionaries tend to be aimed at
the market of less skilled users, both the quantity and quality of the entries are limited.
The following examples are from two such dictionaries.

universe (n.) uchu [gD]; zen-sekai [Tf"]. [10]anduchu g( )D(;_ ) N. universe, cosmos [11]As students progress in Japanese studies, the dictionaries prepared for Japanese speakers become more accessible. This applies particularly to Japanese-English dictionaries.
English-Japanese dictionaries remain a problem, and it is often claimed that there is no
English-Japanese dictionary available which adequately serves the requirements of moderately advanced students. One recent dictionary attempts to bridge this gap. It isessentially a version of a domestic English-Japanese dictionary which has had the English
pronunciations removed, and the readings of all Japanese words which are in kanji added(in the form of furigana, i.e. small hiragana above each character). While this is a considerable advance, it still lacks sucient contextual information in English to enable anon-speaker of Japanese to select between the various translations. The following example
is from that dictionary:

universal a. gD[ ;_ ]2H, H5[Jm` ]H, Tf"[6m5%]H, qEB[ORm@']D, H[JmH ]H. [12]For several decades there have been quite adequate character dictionaries available to
English speakers. The Nelson [13], which sets the benchmark in this type of dictionary,has details of over 5,000 characters, and 70,000 compounds. In recent years several otherdictionaries have been published, including the Spahn & Hadamitzky[14] which broke new
ground by also listing compounds which have the character in reference in other than the
rst position.

2

The hiragana denoted [..] appears as furigana.

6

Chapter 3
The Main Dictionary File
3.1 The EDICT File
The initial dictionary used in the project was the EDICT le supplied as part of the
MOKE (Mark's Own Kanji Editor) PC text editor package, developed by Mark Edwards.
The original EDICT, despite its acronym (English DICTionary), was a basic JapaneseEnglish dictionary text le with the following format:
kanji-headword [yomikata 1] /English-1/English-2/../orkana-headword/English-1/.....
This format is similar to that used in MOKE's henkan 2 les, and was based on thele format used in the SKK 3 FEP 4.
As originally released with MOKE, EDICT had under 2,000 entries, compiled by
Edwards. Like MOKE's reference les, it was encoded using EUC. MOKE provides afacility the search the le sequentially for a text string occurring in the English elds, andalso to match on a kanji headword encountered in a text le. It also can append extra
records to the EDICT le.
As compatibility with MOKE, which at the initial stages of the project was the only
readily available MS-DOS Japanese text editor, appeared to be desirable, the EDICT leformat was retained. Edwards gave his permission for the original EDICT entries to be
included in the project le. Hindsight indicates that the EDICT format has been less thanideal, but as there is now a considerable number of software packages developed aroundthat format, it is unlikely to change.

?Yk: way of reading. The term commonly used for a phonetic transliteration of a word.

1
2 henkan, or conversion les play an important part in Japanese text editors, as they provide themappings needed to translate kana sequences into the appropriate kanji.
3 Simple Kana to Kanji, an FEP package developed by Masahiko Sato at Tohoku University for Nemacs.
4 FrontEnd Program; a term commonly used in Japan for software which takes keystrokes (either
romaji or kana) and converts the text into the appropriate kanji.

73.2 File Structure
A number of le design goals were developed for the project: the le structure would be accessible by users with appropriate text editors. This
meant, in e ect, that the master les would be held in a text form. No indexing
information would be held in the le itself, and it would be the task of software using
the le to reformat the le into, say, an indexed database structure, or to provide
an index system external to the le. As part of this, it was necessary that there
be ready identi cation of tokens consisting of kanji and/or kana strings or English
words for the purposes of indexing and searching.
 the le would lend itself, as far as possible, to bidirectional use, i.e. in support ofboth Japanese-English and English-Japanese searches. The one-to-many nature of
dictionary entries presented a problem which could not be totally resolved without
the introduction of a le structure which included a complex indexing arrangement.
This would, however, violate the rst goal.
After some experimentation with various indexing, search and display techniques,
it was concluded that this goal could be met adequately with a le of the EDICT
structure, provided the English translation elds for each Japanese entry contained
enough contextual information to enable a user, following a search on an English
keyword which resulted in a display of all the entries which contained that word, toselect the appropriate Japanese entry.

3.3 Lexicographic Details
In the development of the contents of the le, the following lexicographic principles havebeen followed:
 no use is made of the romaji system, except when it is appropriate to include it in
an English eld, such as with proper nouns, and with objects such as sukiyaki andsushi, which are well-known by their Japanese names. This decision was made inpart on principle: the Japanese language is rarely written seriously using romaji,
and partly to encourage the learning and use the kana at an early stage in language
acquisition.
 as is the normal practice with Japanese dictionaries, all Japanese verbs and adjectives are listed in their dictionary form 5. Users of such dictionaries are expected
to be able to identify the dictionary form of a word. With electronic dictionaryles,this presents a problem only when an attempt is made to match entries against
text which contains in ected forms of such words. English verbs have been includedin their in nitive form, thus removing the need to mark that they are verbs. In a
few cases it has been necessary to distinguish between transitive and intransitive(Japanese) verbs with the (vt) and (vi) marker.
Japanese has no in nitive form for verbs. The usual practice is to record verbs in dictionaries in theirfamiliar or \plain" non-past form.
58

5N&X: keiyodoshi), also sometimes referred
to as na-adjectives because their nonpast prenominal form ends with a D (na), arerecorded without their D ending, but will have the modi er (an) 6 included as agrammatical indicator.
 words, such as compounds and loanwords, which are commonly combined with theverb 3e (suru) are given the grammatical marker (vs). Such entries do not havethe 3e in either the headword or the yomikata, and the English elds are de nedin the form of nouns or participles.
Example: ' [da d] /cooking (vs)/ nouns which may take the genitive case particle H (no) are marked with the modi er(a-no).
 di ering Japanese spellings of a headword arising from the inconsistent use of okurigana 7 are handled by including separate entries for each common spelling. (This is aninelegant but expedient way of handling what the Japanese refer to as the \okurigana problem", as it enables text-reading software to make appropriate matcheswith entries. As it adds to the size of the le, and could be seen to be encouraging
poor writing practices, it is hoped that at some time such software will incorporate
methods for the deterministic identi cation of okurigana patterns, thus enabling theentries in the le to be con ned to the standard spellings.)
 it was decided to include proper nouns in the le; both the family and given names
commonly used in Japan, and place names. Such entries do not commonly occur indictionaries; however it was considered worthwhile given that the dictionary le isintended to assist, inter alia, with text reading.
 in keeping with the nature of the project, the spelling of the English elds in theentries has been left in the style of the various contributors. Thus, the le contains
a mixture of British and North American spellings. As far as possible, translations
have been edited to ensure that they are broadly comprehensible to speakers of allvarieties of English, and that major national variants are identi ed.
 a number of abbreviated indicators are used in parentheses in the English elds toprovide grammatical and other information about the entries. Among these are: adjectival nouns or quasi-adjectives (

vt
vi
id
col
vul
pn

transitive verb
intransitive verb
idiomatic expression
colloquialism
vulgar expression or word
person name (family or given)an: adjectival nounis the term for writing part of a verb form in kana. Practices vary in okurigana usage, forexample the word ikebana ( ower arrangement) is often written both z + t and z t. The former ispreferred by purists, as it indicates the reading of the z kanji, but the latter is also often seen.
6
7 okurigana

9

pl
giv
fam
pol
hum
hon
pref
suf
uk
uK

place namegiven namefamiliar language
polite (V>: teineigo) language
humble (~>: kenjogo) language
honori c or respectful (8=>: sonkeigo) language
pre x
sux
word usually written using kana alone
word usually written using kanji alone

Here are examples of entries in the le:/bDc /good-bye/1)1)) [1)1)D)] /to sob/to weep/z; /architecture/"O [2]*;] /faucet/tap/> [5'] /changing household registry/Bt [1_)] /withering/atrophy/contraction/
C0 [-g\&i] /Koromogawa (pn,pl)/F ["] /posthumous song or poem/G [1]] /doctor (medical)/K> [7:>] /to raise (child)/to be brought up/to grow (up)/

3.4 File Compilation
As mentioned above, the original EDICT le had fewer than 2,000 entries. A further 2,000
entries were keyed by the author from a rst-year student dictionary [15] published by
Swinburne Institute of Technology (with the kind permission of the authors), and several
hundred more entries were added by the author from lists compiled during Japanesereading and study.
Since the release of this initial version of EDICT in mid-1991, there has been steadyow of entries from persons interested in adding to the coverage of the EDICT le. Several
individuals had compiled extensive personal vocabulary lists, which they contributed. The
Sony company in Japan permitted the inclusion of a signi cant in-house le. Many entries
were derived from a Japanese-German dictionary le in the EDICT format compiled by
Helmut Goldenstein from the Langenscheidt edited by Hadamitzky[16]. As Goldenstein
had permission to make this le freely available, the entries which were not already in the
EDICT le were translated into English.
A major task in developing such a dictionary le is the identi cation and entry of thetens of thousands of kanji compounds which make up the written language, along with10

their yomikata. Fortunately this task has been greatly assisted by the prior work of thetwo main public domain FEP systems in Japan: the above-mentioned SKK system, andthe even larger WNN8 FEP system developed jointly by the Kyoto University ResearchInstitute for Mathematical Sciences, OMRON Corporation and ASTEC Corporation. As
part of the WNN project, a public project was undertaken in which academics, researchersand students throughout Japan submitted kanji/kana entries to go into the large henkan
le, now known as the WNN Pubdic. MOKE's main henkan le was compiled from the
SKK and WNN les, and the existence of these les in the public domain has been amajor factor in the development of EDICT.
Many thousands of entries in EDICT have been derived directly fom the SKK and
WNN sources. These entries are:
1. loanwords (, p >: gairaigo). As one feature of these systems is the ability togenerate a loanword from its English original, there are many English/loanword
pairs which only required reformatting to be included in EDICT.
2. proper nouns. The WNN Pubdic has separate les of jinmei (1h: person name)and chimei (+h: place name) words, which were suitable for immediate conversion
into the EDICT format. In the case of proper nouns, the English translation eld
is used for the romanized transliteration of the words, e.g.

] [Lg1X] /Hiroshima (pl)/Note that a slightly modi ed version of the common Hepburn system of romanization has been used throughout the EDICT le. In Japanese the lengthened formof the vowel \o" ($) is almost always written $ (ou), whereas in romaji it is usually written \oo" or \o", and on occasions \oh". In order to re ect the Japaneseorthography more accurately, and to be compatible with the usage of common FEP
systems, the \ou" convention has been followed throughout. Thus  (B U)) willappear as Touhoku, not Toohoku or Tohoku. The only exceptions to this are selected entries for Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, which are well-known in that form, andmay not be recognized in the more orthographically correct versions of Toukyou,
Oosaka and Kyouto.

An acronym formed from Japanese sentence \Watashi no Namae wa Nakano desu" (my name is
Nakano), as a design goal of the WNN project was to be able to enter such a sentence, and have thecorrect kanji and kana [PHhPIBA3] selected automatically.
811

Chapter 4
The Character Dictionary File
The second le necessary for a complete dictionary system is the character le, containing
information about each of the kanji commonly used in Japanese. Such a le ful ls a
number of roles in a dictionary system:
1. to record against each character the key items which can be used to identify thecharacter, e.g. radical, stroke count or reading;
2. to record other information of interest in scholarship or translation, such as the
English meaning(s) associated with the character, references to major dictionaries,
coding schemes, etc.
3. to provide a starting point for dictionary software, once a character has been identi ed, to search the main dictionary le and display compounds containing thatcharacter.

4.1 Character File Structure
In keeping with the goals of the main dictionary le, the character le was compiled asa simple text le (KANJIDIC) with one line for each of the 6,353 kanji characters in the
JIS X 0208-1990 standard.
Each line consists of a number of space-separated elds. The elds in the lines of
information are:1. the kanji itself.
2. the 4-byte ASCII representation of the hexadecimal coding of the two-byte JIS
encoding of the character. This eld is to facilitate editing and manipulation of thele.
3. information elds, beginning with a unique identifying letter or pair of letters. At
the time of writing the eld types in use are:
 U[hexnum] - The Unicode encoding of the kanji, one per line. (See Appendix

C for information on the Unicode system.)12 N[num] - the index number in the Nelson dictionary. There will be one perline unless the character is not in Nelson, or is considered to be a non-standard
version, in which case there will be a fsee Nnnng cross-reference appended tothe meanings elds.
 B[num] - the radical (=: bushu) number, one per line. As far as possible, thisis the radical number used in Nelson. In a number of cases Nelson classi es
the character di erently from the classical or historical usage. In these cases,
the classical or historical radical numbers follow as a separate C[num] entry or
entries.
 C[num] - the historical or classical radical number (where this di ers from theB[num] entry.)
 S[num] - the stroke count, at least one entry per line. If there is more than
one eld, the rst is considered the accepted count, while subsequent ones arecommon variants.
 G[num] - The joyo grade level (i.e. the elementary school grades in which
the characters are taught in Japan.) There is at most one per line, with thefollowing coding:G1 through G6 indicate joyo grades 1-6.
G8 indicates the remaining (seondary school) general-use characters.
G9 indicates jinmeiyo (1h Y: for use in names) characters. Thesekanji lie outside the joyo, but are permitted in names.
 H[num] - the index number in Halpern [17]. There is at most one per line.
 F[num] - the frequency-of-use ranking, as reported in [17]. At present, the2,135 most-used characters have a ranking. Those characters that lack thiseld are not ranked.
 P[code] - the SKIP pattern code, similar to that used in Halpern[17]. The code
is of the form P[num]-[num]-[num]. See Halpern for a description of his SKIP
pattern code 1.
 Q[num.num] - the four-corner encoding of the kanji. This is a Chinese classi cation system which categorizes the stroke combinations in the corners of the
kanji. Some older Japanese character dictionaries, such as Morohashi, include
a four-corner index.
 MN[num] - the index number in the Morohashi daikanwajiten. In the few cases
where JIS kanji are not in Morohashi, the index indicates the last number withthe same Bushu and stroke count.
 MP[num.num] - the volume and page in Morohashi on which the entry is tobe found for the kanji.
 E[num] - the index number in Henshall[18]. Only the joyo kanji are covered bythis book.

At the time of writing, this eld is not included in the distributed version of the le, as Halpern has
claimed patent and copyright protection for the system.
1

13

 Y[xxxxx] - the PinYin (Mandarin Chinese) reading of the character, including

the tone. There may be several PinYin elds for each kanji, however the kokuji(!f: characters developed in Japan) do not have these elds.

4. the readings used for the characters. As is a common practice in character dictionaries, the on readings are in katakana and the kun readings in hiragana. Readings
used as pre xes and suxes are indicated by a trailing and leading \-" respectively,
and a \." is used to separate a reading from its okurigana. Note that the readings
are not in any particular order, and are based on common usage rather than anyocially approved lists.
5. the English translations and/or notes. Each eld is encapsulated by a pair of braces
f..g.
Here are examples of the entries for a number of common kanji in the KANJIDIC le:k 312b U96e8 N5042 B173 S8 G1 H3561 F595 P4-8-1 Q1022.7 MP12.0001

MN42210 E3 Yyu3 Yyu4 ~ [ X- -/[ fraing
N 3230 U5c4b N1392 B44 S9 G3 H3098 F318 P3-3-6 Q7721.4 MP4.0149
MN7684 E236 Ywu1  ^ froofg fhouseg fshopg fdealerg fsellerg
 3147 U6620 N2118 B72 B73 S9 G6 H892 F362 P1-4-5 Q6503.0 MP5.0806
MN13838 E81 Yying4 Yang3 | > .e > .3 I."e -J." fre ectg fre ectiong
fprojectiong

4.2 Character File Compilation
The compilation of the KANJIDIC le began in late 1991 when a contributor to the mainle obtained and provided the basic (bushu, stroke count and reading) information for the
JIS Level 1 kanji. This was extended shortly afterwards to include the JIS Level 2 kanji
by the provision of a le of the bushu and stroke counts from a public source in Japan.
The Sony dictionary le provided many of the Nelson indices, readings and initial English
translations.
In the following eighteen months there was a large amount of painstaking editorial
work carried out by several contributors to verify and expand the information elds.
During this time the Nelson indices and the Grade codes were completed and veri ed; theHalpern and Henshall indices, the usage fequencies, and the SKIP codes compiled; andthe readings and translations established and veri ed for all but a small number of thecharacters.
In early 1993, the author became aware of a similar le which had been compiled by
Christian Wittern at Kyoto University with some material provided by Urs App fromHanazono University. Wittern made this le available to the project, and it is fromthis source that the Morohashi, four-corner and PinYin elds are derived. A further
veri cation of the Nelson indices was also made with this source.
14

Chapter 5
Copyright Issues
Dictionary copyright is a complex issue, because clearly the rst lexicographer who published \v (inu) means dog" could not claim a copyright violation by all subsequentJapanese dictionaries. What makes each dictionary unique (and copyrightable) is theparticular selection of words, the phrasing of the meanings, the presentation of the contents (a very important point in the case of these les), and the means of publication.
Advice to the author from people with experience in copyright matters is that EDICT
and KANJIDIC are in no di erent a position than any other new dictionary. While there
is a popular view that material in the public domain keyed in by volunteers is somehow
exempt from copyright law, the more considered opinion is that the same restrictions
apply as for any other form of publication.
Copying material from published dictionaries has been discouraged during the development of these les, but with a voluntary e ort being carried out simultaneously in many
countries, it has been dicult to police this matter. It has also been the established practice for lexicographers to use previous works as reference material in the development of
their own dictionaries. Nelson, in the foreword to his character dictionary, acknowledges
his indebtedness to many other dictionaries and reference works, the list of which covers
more than a page. While there is a certain amount of \honour among thieves" in commercial lexicography, dictionary compilers frequently include bogus entries in order to trap
pirates of their material. Several such entries were noticed in Spahn & Hadamitzky[14],where obscure kanji were given English meanings from Lewis Carroll's \Jabberwocky"(brillig, slithy, borogove, etc.)
Two interesting points of copyright arise in relation to the character dictionary le: thele contains indices identifying the characters in a number of major dictionaries (Nelson, Halpern, etc.) It is important to consider whether those indices areprotected by copyright, and whether their inclusion in the le can be viewed as abreach of the copyright of those publications.
The position taken with KANJIDIC is that the indices are not intrinsic components of the information content of those publications. They are pointers to theinformation in the publications, and their presence in the KANJIDIC le merely
facilitates access to the relevant information, in the same manner as a page number.
The practice of including indices to other dictionaries is well-established. Nelson
includes the indices of the Fuzanbo dictionary, and the author's copy of the pre-war
15

Rose-Innes [19] character dictionary includes indices for the contemporary editionof the Ueda daikanwajiten[20].
 a more dicult point arose with the SKIP codes mentioned above. Halpern statesin his dictionary that patent protection has been sought for the encoding method,and speci cally advises that the codes must not be used without permission to order
or index characters in other dictionaries. While a number of users of the les haveexpressed doubt to the author about the validity of such a patent, as the encoding
system is quite similar to others used previously by other authors, it is clear thatthe presence of the SKIP codes in the le could, with appropriate software, be used
to identify the kanji, and thus would violate a valid copyright. For this reason the
distribution of the SKIP codes was discontinued until the issue could be resolved.
The copyright of the project dictionary les presumably belongs to the myriad ofcontributors. However with the placing of the project in the public domain from the
beginning, it is clear that the protection sought is minimal. The only restrictions placedon the distribution of the les is that no charge must be made other than a nominal charge
for the medium, and that the les must not be incorporated in commercial products.
With regard to this latter point, there have been discussions with several prospective
developers of commercial packages about access to the les. The agreed position has
been that products may access the les, but they may not include the dictionary lesthemselves for more than a nominal charge, and they must provide the facility for users
to obtain and incorporate updated versions of the les.

16

Chapter 6
Conclusion
The project described in this paper represents a major development in computer lexicography, and a considerable achievement, considering that its compilation has been carriedout largely by volunteers who are employed in elds other than linguistics and language
instruction.
Software packages drawing upon the les have been compared favourably with expensive commercial products. A technical translator of Japanese working in the USA
remarked in correspondence with the author recently that the les are \the" information
source increasingly being used in his eld.

17

Chapter 7
Acknowledgements
The total number of people who have contributed to the project is approaching a hundred. Their work is most gratefully acknowledged, and their names are recorded in the
documentation les of the project.
The author is particularly indebted to the following people, who have made signi cantcontributions:
Urs App, Stephen Chung, Lee Collins, John Crossley, Hitoshi Doi, Mark Edwards,
Mike Erickson, Curtis Eubanks, Je rey Friedl, Magnus Halldorsson, Ken Lunde, Theresa
Martin, Kevin Moore, Yasuaki Nakano, Cli ord Olling, Alfredo Pinochet, Harold Rowe,Iain Sinclair, Rik Smoody, Kurt Stueber, Hidekazu Tozaki, Scott Trent, Richard Walters,
Christian Wittern.

18

Appendix A
The Japanese Writing System
The following is a very brief outline of the essential elements of Japanese orthography.
The language is written in three sets of graphical symbols: kanji. These are the characters invented in China, and introduced to Japan during

the rst millenium AD. Instead of representing a vowel or consonant, a kanji character represents a word or a morpheme. Of the tens of thousands of kanji, the Japanese
Education Ministry has established a set of 1,945 joyo (uY: general-use) kanji foruse in domains such as schools, textbooks and newspapers. This set forms the basisof modern Japanese literacy, although several thousand additional kanji are in use
in special subject areas. Each kanji has, in general, two sets of pronunciations orreadings. The kun reading is usually derived from an archaic Japanese source, andapplies when characters are used singly in nouns, verb roots, etc., or are used in
combinations to form proper nouns. Such words are known as wago (>: native
Japanese words). The on readings usually derive from Chinese sources, and are
believed to be the result of the adoption of many Chinese words and concepts into
Japanese during the assimilation of the writing system centuries ago. On-readings
are used when two or more characters are used together to form a new word or compound. These words are known as kango (>: Chinese word). As an example ofthe di erent types of readings, the character  has the meaning of east, and is usedalone to write the word meaning east (higashi). Thus the kun reading is higashi.
When used in a compound with the character 6, which means capital, a new wordwith the meaning eastern-capital is created, with the pronunciation tokyo. Thus theon reading is to.
 hiragana and katakana. These are two syllabaries, collectively known as kana, whichwere developed in Japan during the second half of the rst millenium AD. Bothwere developed from kanji characters which were traditionally used phonetically.
Hiragana is more cursive in shape, and katakana more angular.
Example: Lc&D (hiragana), " (katakana)In their modern forms, each syllabary has 46 basic symbols: 5 representing the vevowels (a i u e o), 40 consonant+vowel syllables (ka ki .. sa shi ..) and a single
consonant (n). Other symbols are created through the use of diacritic marks to19

indicate voiced or labial consonants. Several small kana are also used as vowel andconsonant modi ers, bringing the total number of distinct syllables in modern use
to over one hundred.
Although either syllabary can be used e ectively to write any Japanese text, in modern
Japanese the three sets of symbols are used together in distinctly di erent roles:
1. kanji are used to write the base forms of most nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.
2. hiragana is used to write most of the grammatical elements, such as the in ecting
portions of verbs and adjectives, connectives and particles, as well as demonstratives,
many personal pronouns, and a number of other words such as auxiliary verbs.
3. katakana is used primarily for the many thousands of loanwords (,p>: gairaigo)
which have entered Japanese from other languages in recent centuries. Most ofthese have come from English, although a number have also come from Chinese,
French, Portuguese, Dutch and German. It is also used for emphasis and for many
onomatopoeic words.
The following simple sentence demonstrates a combination of all three:%> I )  A A l 7 X19  (Meaning: Yukiko bought a kimono at the
department store.)
The kanji components of this sentence are: %> (yukiko) - proper name (the characters mean snow child); A (kimono) (the characters mean wearing object); 7 (ka) - the root of the the verb kau (to buy).
The hiragana components are:
 I (wa) - particle marking the sentence topic; A (de) - the particle indicating location of an action; l (wo) - the particle indicating the preceding phrase is the object of the verb.
 X19 (imashita) - the \past tense, polite" in ection appropriate for the verb kau.
The katakana component is: ) (depaato) - the abbreviated loanword derived from the English department
store.
Japanese can also be written using the Latin alphabet. The representation of Japanesesyllables in this alphabet is called romaji (E6f), of which there are several forms. In thispaper the Hepburn system is used. Romaji is used in Japan where it may assist foreigners,
such as on railway station signs, and in much advertising and shop signage where it hasa certain chic appeal. Apart from some elementary language texts for foreign students, it
has virtually no role in written Japanese language.
20

Appendix B
Japanese Text Processing[Part of the information in this appendix was drawn from the document \Electronic
Handling of Japanese Text", by Ken Lunde, which is in a freely available public domain
le: \JAPAN.INF". Lunde has greatly expanded this document in producing his recent
text[5].]The advent of computers, and the relatively limited codesets which prevailed in theearly decades of computerization, represented a considerable challenge to would-be Japanese computer users. Until the 1970s most Japanese computer systems were restricted tousing romaji or one of the kana, usually katakana, for input and output. Some commentators even expressed the view that the incapability of computers to handle the large symbol
sets used in Chinese and Japanese would hasten the demise of those writing systems.
The invention of output devices, such as laser printers, capable of handling a large variety of symbols with sucient precision, combined with the reduction in the manufacturingcosts of programmable graphics display devices and micro-electronics in general enabled,by the early 1980s, a progressive incorporation of traditional Japanese orthography into
Japanese computer systems.
One of the essential elements in the computerization of any symbol set is the standardization of the coding system used to represent the symbols. After considerable experimentation and development by Japanese computer companies, a Japanese Industrial
Standard (JIS C 6226-1978) Code of the Japanese Graphic Character Set for Information
Interchange was released in 1978, with further revisions in 1983 and 1990 to track the
introduction and update of the joyo kanji set and its extensions. The current standard
is JIS X 208-1990. In this standard, a two-byte code is used for each symbol. The code
ranges were selected to enable them to be incorporated as graphical extensions to thecommon compatible coding systems used world-wide (ASCII, CCITT No. 5 Alphabet,
AS1776, etc.). Also the codes were selected to lie within the printable characters of the
ASCII set, and thus they could, with the insertion of suitable shift-in/shift-out sequences,be mixed in text and electronic mail les with characters from the other codes. The total
number of symbols capable of encoding by this system is 8,836 (94 by 94). However thisis ample to provide for all the characters in common Japanese use.
The code standard covers 6,877 characters: 6,353 kanji in 2 levels (level 1: 2,965
kanji arranged by on-reading; level 2: 3,388 kanji arranged by radical), 86 katakana, 83
hiragana, 10 numerals, 52 English characters, 147 symbols, 66 Russian characters, 48
Greek characters, and 32 line elements. The separation of the kanji into 2 levels was21

to accommodate the systems which did not want the expense of storing the graphicalrepresentation of many rarely-used characters. The adoption of the on-reading order forthe level 1 kanji was to assist the users of the very early word-processor systems, wherecharacter entry was by ordinal index. The kana with diacritic marks are included as
separate characters, as are a selection of small kana.
A supplemental character set (JIS X 0212-1992) has also been established, whichcontains a further 5,801 rarely-used kanji.
The raw JIS codes cannot be used in text documents as they coincide with normal
ASCII codes. Three code-modi cation systems are commonly employed to distinguishbetween the encoded Japanese and normal 7-bit codes:
1. JIS-code. This is a 7-bit encapsulation method recommended in the JIS standard
document. In it, a 3-byte kanji-in shift sequence is prepended to a segment ofJapanese text, and a 2-byte kanji-out sequence appended. The raw JIS codes areused between the two shift sequences. This method is commonly used for document
les which are being transmitted over communications networks, as only 7 bits ofeach byte are used, but is less often used within computer systems as the shift
sequences complicate the text-handling.
2. EUC (Extended Unix Code, also known as AT&T JIS). This is an 8-bit code inwhich 128 is added to the two raw JIS codes, thus setting the most signi cant bitof each of the bytes to 1. EUC is used in Unix systems, and in some MS-DOS PC
systems.
3. Shift-JIS, also known as MS-KANJI. This is also an 8-bit code, and also has themost signi cant bit of the rst byte set to one, but distributes the information
content of the raw JIS codes unevenly over the two bytes. This is done to maintaincompatibility with the earlier half-width encoding system for kana. Shift-JIS isused in Macintosh systems, the NEC 9800 series of PCs, and DOS/V (the Japaneseversion of MS-DOS PC operating system.)22

Appendix C
The Unicode Coding System(The following information about Unicode was provided by Lee Collins at Taligent.)
The Unicode sequences are the nal ocial mapping to JIS of the CJK-JRG's (Chinese,
Japanese, Korean - Joint Research Group) \Uni ed Repertoire and Ordering Version 2.0"
which is the uni ed Han character set of ISO 10646 and Unicode. All of the Unicode
companies (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, NeXT, Taligent, etc) are now using this mapping.
There has been some confusion because of di erence in nomenclature. Unicode people
call it UniHan, the Chinese sometimes call it HCS (Han Character Set) and ISO calls
it \Ideographic CJK Character Uni ed Repertoire and Ordering". ISO cannot use theterm \Han character" because Japan was very sensitive to this (even though it is a directtranslation of \Kanji") and it cannot be called a character set because only ISO WG2 isempowered with the authority to encode characters. Problems of naming aside, they are
all the same thing.
The CJK-JRG was formed under the aegis of ISO in 1990 to investigate and propose a
uni ed Han character set for inclusion in ISO 10646. It brought together various experts
on Han characters from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States
selected by the national bodies participating in ISO WG2. Including the initial work in
the US on Unicode and in China on GB 13000, which were merged and became the basis
for the URO, the task spanned about 4 years The work was completed in April 1992.
It contains 21,000 Han characters from all of the major standards used in East Asia,
including JIS X 0208-1990 and JIS X 0212-1990.
The Unicode consortium provides a cross-reference le for all of the source sets.
For further details about the URO/UniHan, refer to the \The Unicode Standard Version 1.0 Vol II" published by Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-60845-6. For a slightly di erent
presentation of the characters, a copy of 10646 or of the \Ideographic CJK Character
Uni ed Repertoire and Ordering Version 2.0" might be available through the local representative on ISO WG2.

23

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24

[17] J. Halpern, New Japanese-English Character Dictionary. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1990.
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