Helen FieldsScience Writer

When I lived in Japan, in the late 90’s, the internet was still a relatively new thing. I actually had a kind of proto-blog, on Geocities, and I did something Skype-like to call home for free…but my dictionaries were on paper. These days, though, the unpoetically named Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC is rocking my world. And that’s why it’s the Dictionary of the Week.

Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC has got everything. You can look up characters by counting the number of strokes in them. You can type out a Japanese word phonetically, with roman letters, or in Japanese, if you happen to know how to make your computer write in Japanese. You can look words up in the general Japanese-English dictionary, or one of many other dictionaries – including automotive, Japanese-Slovenian, and river & water systems.

I use this dictionary for reading e-mails from my Japanese choir. I’ve been singing for a few months with the Japanese Choral Society of Washington (oh hey, I’m in the picture that’s on the homepage right now). During rehearsal, I’m ok – I can mostly follow what’s being said. It helps that I do a lot of choral singing and have a good idea of the kinds of things that conductors say. But a lot of important information gets transmitted by e-mail. It is so handy to be able to just cut and paste the words I don’t know into the dictionary.

I got a whole string of e-mails today from the group. One, about a potluck after rehearsal next week,contained the lovely word 帰国. The first character means “return” and the second means “country,” so together it means “go back to your country” – part of the occasion for the potluck is that a choir member is going back to Japan. It’s pronounced “kikoku.”

If you cut and paste that into the dictionary, you get a whole list of definitions. The first one is the word you looked up. Then there’s also compound words it appears in, like 帰国セール, kikokuseiru (sale), to sell your belongings before returning to your country, or 帰国子女枠, kikokushijowaku, special consideration for students who have lived abroad. Each entry has the word, the pronunciation, definition, a recording of someone saying it, and a string of links. Here are the ones for 帰国:

[V][Ex][G][GI][S][A][W] [JW]

Each of those looks up 帰国 in a different database – V takes you to all the ways you can conjugate 帰国 as a verb (I didn’t know I knew the hortative, but apparently I do), Ex is a list of sentences using 帰国, G is google, GI is google images, S is an online Japanese-Japanese dictionary, A is a Japanese-English online dictionary (for Japanese people), W is Japanese Wikipedia, and JW is some kind of Japanese word database.

The WWWJDIC doesn’t have the most beautiful interface, but it sure does a lot of stuff. I’m pretty sure I’ve only discovered a tiny corner of it, but I am very grateful to it for helping me read my e-mails.

Oh wow, yeah, I just came across this, for example: an interface that lets you handwrite a kanji with the mouse while the computer guesses what you’re going for.

Dictionary Stats: Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC

date: predates the world wide web; constantly updating
publisher: Jim Breen seems to be the guy; Monash University in Australia hosts the dictionary (he’s retired from the Electronic Dictionary Research Group)
other languages: Japanese – German, French, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian
amusing entry from FAQ: “[Q] I can’t read the kana readings. Will you add romaji display as an option.
[A] No. Better to learn kana. It will only take a week or two.”
insight from FAQ: “Remember that it is really a Japanese-English dictionary, and you have to take your chances with English-Japanese.”
obscenities: Yup. I can only remember one rude word in Japanese (糞), but it’s in there.

P.S. I know, I know, the Dictionary of the Week is now more like the Dictionary of the Quarter. It took a little hiatus. I don’t know if it’s back for good now or just dropping in.