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, 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 — each page marks whether its story has been human-reviewed.

Other

WanaKana (MIT) converts romaji search input to kana.

Database built 2026-08-30T03:40:02.558Z.