jmdict

is a small command-line frontend to the Japanese Multi-lingual Electronic Dictionary (JMdict). JMdict is compiled and maintained by Jim Breen and The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group at Monash University, Australia. Please note the differentiation made: jmdict is the program distributed here; JMdict is the database used by it and is owned and maintained by mentioned others.

There is a graphical user interface to JMdict called gjdict by Daniel Albuschat which is partly based on this project. For most users it will be more comfortable.

What you need

• An UTF-8-capable terminal (failing at this? try gjdict!)
• sqlite-3
• expat
• the JMdict XML file
• and of course the source to jmdict

Compiling

1. make PREFIX=prefix
   PREFIX defaults to /usr and can be changed to something else e.g. for local installs.
2. make install PREFIX=prefix DESTDIR=destdir
   Again PREFIX defaults to /usr and must be consistent with PREFIX passed to make. DESTDIR is optional and defaults to nothing. It can be used e.g. for sandbox builds.

Using

Use jmdict_import <dictionary> [destdir] once to create the dictionary database. dictionary is the filename of the extracted JMdict.gz. destdir is an optional destination directory to place the resulting SQLite database in, defaulting to ".".

After that, run jmdict without arguments, it will explain itself.

License

jmdict is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. JMdict, the dictionary file jmdict is based on, is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Download

Releases can be found on SourceForge.

Changelog

0.9 (Feb 08 2015 10:32 GMT)

• Improved kana to romaji translation,
• Disabled kana to romaji translation by default. It can be restored using the -r flag.
• Added missing unistd.h include.

0.8.1 (Feb 27 2009 16:22 GMT)

• Fixed the translation of chouon.

0.8 (Feb 27 2009 11:14 GMT)

• Fixed a lot of broken translations from kana to romaji.
• Added more double width characters to the kana2romaji map.
• Added a lot more warning options.

0.8_pre1 (May 26 2008 22:18 GMT)

• Added some more missing characters.

0.7 (Apr 09 2008 18:05 GMT)

• Added some missing characters to the kana2romaji map.
• Reflect on recent changes in the JMdict XML file where language strings now consist of three characters rather than two.

0.6.1 (Mar 09 2008 00:33 GMT)

• Fixed some gcc-4.3 building issues.

0.6 (Oct 02 2007 18:42 GMT)

• Fixed language attribute names (this has changed in JMdict recently).
• Added -Wextra to compile options.
• Added make install including PREFIX and DESTDIR support.
• jmdict_import supports DESTDIR as well (passed in as the second (optional) parameter).

0.5 (Oct 26 2006 20:04 GMT)

• migrated to sqlite-3. Please note that you will have to recreate your database!
• jmdict_import now removes the previous database file before recreating the database
• added -ansi -pedantic to CXXFLAGS

0.4 (Oct 24 2006 20:38 GMT)

• fixed jmdict_import bug
• jmdict_import now checks for proper use first and initializes structures after (this could have taken a couple of time)
• jmdict now shows a romanized string of each kana string as well
• added another character to the kana2romaji map
• added an raii class to take care of memory allocated from sqlite_mprintf
• some code cleanup

0.3 (Oct 18 2004 09:19 GMT)

• minimal/essential fix... now compiling on non-genius compilers

0.2 (Oct 13 2004 22:29 GMT)

• removed non-japanese-only-restriction for -f
• renamed -r to -j, introduced -J
• added -b (search for beginning) and -i (search case-insensitively)
• fixed some minor bugs/restrictions I don't remember

0.1 (Oct 07 2004 21:38 GMT)

• initial release