MacJDic

MacJDic is a freeware electronic Japanese-English dictionary program for the Macintosh. It was written by Dan Crevier, based on xjdic by Jim Breen

MacJDic functions as:

• a Japanese-English Dictionary (waei jiten), searching for and displaying entries for keywords or phrases entered in Japanese (hiragana or katakana);
• an English-Japanese Dictionary (eiwa jiten), searching for and displaying entries for key-words entered in English;
• a Japanese-English Character Dictionary (kanei jiten), capable of selecting kanji by a wide variety of techniques, such as radical, stroke count, Nelson Index number, Halpern Index number, SKIP code, Four Corner code or reading, and displaying information about the kanji, and then, optionally, compounds containing that kanji.

MacJDic depends for its performance on a pair of dictionary files; a Japanese/English dictionary and a Kanji dictionary. Usually associated with MacJDic is the EDICT dictionary, and KANJIDIC, both maintained by Jim Breen.

MacJDic requires KanjiTalk or the Japanese Language Kit to run.

While MacJDic is not aligned with any particular printed dictionary, it draws upon index fields in KANJIDIC to provide a search service which complements two major dictionaries:

• the "Japanese-English Character Dictionary", compiled by Andrew N. Nelson and published by Tuttle.
• the "New Japanese-English Character Dictionary" compiled by Jack Halpern and published by both Kenkyuusha and NTC.

In addition to the dictionaries mentioned above, several other dictionary files have been compiled in a suitable format for use by MacJDic. These include the LIFSCDIC bio-medical dictionary file and the JDDICT Japanese/German dictionary file.

All the Japanese displayed by MacJDic is in kana and kanji, so if you cannot read at least hiragana and katakana, this is not the program for you. The author has no intention whatsover of producing a version using romanized Japanese.

MacJDic is available from a number of ftp archive sites around the world. The master site is Monash University's ftp.cc.monash.edu.au. It is also available in the United States at ftp.boingo.com.

This page was based on Jim Breen's JDIC page.