Jishonari

In the course of this series, we've introduced a lot of online Japanese dictionaries, but it's hard to think of one quite like Jishonari, which has so many features packed into one site. It's astounding!

Jishonari is divided into three panels:

1. Japanese reader: Browse the newsfeed from either Aozora Bunko or Reddit, or paste in your own text. Once you're reading, click on any word to bring up definitions and info galore.

2. Definitions: Whenever you search for a word or click one in the reader, the definitions appear here. You can get JMDict definitions, as well as related definitions from WordNet.

3. Details/synonyms: Example sentences from tatoeba and synonyms live here, as well as stroke order and readings for words with kanji. Search for a verb, and you'll get conjugations too.

If you're on the hunt for a new Japanese dictionary experience, you've found it.

This is just the tip of Jishonari's iceberg. All over the page, you can click and hover to reveal more information, ever-unfolding into an incredible rabbit-hole experience. There's even a dark mode!

It's hard to convey just how much information explodes from Jishonari every time you search (and you can search in romaji, kanji, kana, conjugated forms, English, and more). To give you an example, here's a table showing everything we found when we looked up 食べる:

See what we mean? With all these features, Jishonari may seem like the obvious choice for your new go-to dictionary. And it just might be! Its major strength also happens to be its biggest drawback—because it's so full-featured, it can be hard to navigate and find the information (or the most accurate definition) you're looking for, especially when you're searching for a word you've never seen before.

Still, if you're on the hunt for a new Japanese dictionary experience, you've found it. Jishonari offers all kinds of options to explore and play with.