Epwing dictionaries

Aug 7, 2020

What is EPWING?

It seems to be a legacy format for dictionary data, that was / is mostly used by Japanese electronic dictionaries. I remember someone complaining about its great inconsistency as a format, so as to make importing data from it difficult. It seems that there needs to be custom parsers written for each different publishers version of the format. I came across it as a Japanese learner. The browser dictionary extension yomichan can import some of these to provide J:J ¹ look ups. The J:J dictionaries I find most useful are the ones targeted at people of my reading level (kids). These are not available as EPWING.

Why do I care?

Because yomichan sometimes doesn’t give you the defintion of longer phrases, and I wanted to find a dictionary that might have contained longer connected keywords, so I could make flashcards directly of those, instead of their component parts.

Why this post?

to remember that there is a big collection of them here.