Kotoba – Japanese – English dictionary

Kotoba is a Japanese-English dictionary application for GNOME.

It’s designed for quick, fully offline dictionary lookups, letting users search using Japanese scripts, rōmaji, or English meanings. The app focuses on responsive search, detailed dictionary entries, conjugation handling, and a simple workflow for saving useful words for later review.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

  • Searches for entries using kanji, kana, rōmaji, or English meanings.
  • Shows matching results almost instantly while typing.
  • Displays readings, meanings, example sentences, and usage notes where available.
  • Recognizes conjugated verb and adjective forms and maps them to their base dictionary entries.
  • Includes bookmarks for saving entries to revisit later.
  • Works fully offline with no internet connection required.

Website: gitlab.gnome.org/haydn/kotoba
Support:
Developer: Haydn Trowell
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Kotoba in action

Kotoba is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.


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ArthaHandy off-line thesaurus based on WordNet
StarDictPowerful features such as Glob-style pattern matching
WordbookOffline English-English dictionary application built for GNOME
Quick LookupSimple GTK dictionary application
sdcvSimple cross-platform text-base utility
cambdCambridge dictionary CLI app
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rdictOffline CLI dictionary using data from wiktionary.
LexiSelf-driven dictionary app

Read our verdict in the software roundup.


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