This repo contains archived versions of EDRDG dictionary files starting from late 2023. An automated process uploads the latest version of each file daily.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| JMdict | The full Japanese-Multilingual Dictionary XML file |
| JMdict_e | JMdict with only English-language glossaries |
| JMdict_e_examp | JMdict_e with Tatoeba example sentences included |
| JMdict_b | JMdict_e without the extra name entries sourced from JMnedict.xml |
| JMdict_e_NG | "Next Generation" version of JMdict_e |
| JMdict_e_NG_examp | NG version of JMdict_e_examp |
| JMdict_b_NG | NG version of JMdict_b |
| JMnedict.xml | The Japanese Multilingual Named Entity Dictionary |
| examples.utf | Japanese-to-English example sentences from the Tatoeba project, indexed to JMdict entries |
| kanjidic2.xml | The Kanjidic2 kanji dictionary XML file |
Why bother keeping an archive of old file versions? Aside from the historical value of being able to track changes to the dictionary data, this archive is also valuable for the purpose of reproducible software packaging. If a version of a particular software package is built using EDRDG data from a particular date, then the reproducibility of that package relies upon the continued availability of that version of the data.
Files are archived as sequences of patches which may be applied to a
base file. For example, to get the JMdict file for 2024-01-01, you
would first need to decompress the base file (2023-08-20) at
JMdict/JMdict.br, apply the first decompressed patch file
(2023-09-25), apply the second decompressed patch file (2023-09-26),
etc., until finally applying the patch for 2024-01-01.
A script is available in a separate project for the purpose of automating this process.
Some of these decompressed XML files are very large (>100 MiB) and over GitHub's size limit.
Brotli is free software that offers good lossless compression ratios comparable to other modern algorithms like Zstandard. I chose it because it was the best of the options available in the dotnet standard library.
EDRDG dictionary files are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (V4.0). See the EDRDG license page for details.