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 is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Dictionary Tools | |
|---|---|
| GoldenDict-ng | Advanced dictionary lookup program, supporting many formats |
| GoldenDict | Feature-rich tool offering translations of words and phrases |
| PyGlossary | Tool for converting dictionary files aka glossaries |
| OpenDict | Supports popular computer dictionary formats including Slowo and Mova |
| xfce4-dict | Client program to query dictionaries |
| SilverDict | Web-based alternative to GoldenDict |
| Artha | Handy off-line thesaurus based on WordNet |
| Wordbook | Offline English-English dictionary application built for GNOME |
| Quick Lookup | Simple GTK dictionary application |
| sdcv | Simple cross-platform text-base utility |
| AyanDict | Basic dictionary app |
| StarDict | Powerful features such as Glob-style pattern matching |
| charcoal | Command line dictionary that's an alternative to wudao-dict |
| cambd | Cambridge dictionary CLI app |
| Words | Multilingual offline dictionary |
| rdict | Offline CLI dictionary using data from wiktionary. |
| Lexi | Self-driven dictionary app |
| Kotoba | Japanese – English dictionary |
| GNOME Dictionary | Simple, clean, GUI DICT tool |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |