Credits & licences

Kanji Decipher is built entirely from freely-licensed data. Because KanjiVG is share-alike (CC BY-SA), this site’s derived database and pages are offered under CC BY-SA as well.

KanjiVG

Stroke-order paths and component / radical decomposition.

Author: Ulrich Apel
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: github.com/KanjiVG/kanjivg

KANJIDIC2

Meanings (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese), on’yomi / kun’yomi readings, stroke counts, radical numbers, grade and frequency.

Publisher: EDRDG / Jim Breen (Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group)
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
Version: file 4.0, database 2026-241
Source: edrdg.org — KANJIDIC Project

The SKIP code field in KANJIDIC2 is licensed CC BY-NC-SA (non-commercial) and is deliberately not used anywhere in this project.

JMdict

Example words (jukugo) — the common words shown on each kanji page, with readings and glosses.

Publisher: EDRDG / Jim Breen (Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group)
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
Version: 2026-08-24 (common-words subset)
Source: edrdg.org — JMdict/EDICT

KRADFILE / RADKFILE

Kanji ↔ component decomposition — powers the radical picker and the “shares components” links.

Author: James Breen / EDRDG
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: edrdg.org — RADKFILE/KRADFILE

JMdict, KRADFILE and RADKFILE are used here via the JSON conversion published by jmdict-simplified (scriptin).

Origin stories

The plain-language origin explanations are generated by Anthropic’s Claude (Haiku) from the component and meaning data above. They are convenience summaries, not scholarship, and may be wrong.

Other

WanaKana (MIT) converts romaji search input to kana.

Database built 2026-09-01T02:16:40.378Z.