CoJaK

Version 1.0

CoJaK is a Chinese/Japanese/Korean dictionary. It can run on any Java™ capable machine.
CoJaK is copyright 2003 by Tal Liron. More of his free software projects are available at his "home" page.

Before you download it, you must agree to the terms of the GNU General Public License. This license lets you use, copy and change this software as you please, but requires that you make any changes available to the public, thus guaranteeing that CoJaK will keep getting better. (This is the same license used by the Linux family of operating systems.)

This version of CoJaK integrates the following projects:

CCDICT, the Chinese character dictionary (version 4.2)
CEDICT, the Chinese/English dictionary (version January 23, 2003)
KANJIDIC, the Kanji dictionary (version September 1, 2003)
EDICT, the Japanese/English dictionary (version August 19, 2003)
ENGDIC, the Korean/English dictionary (version 0.4)
The Lucene search engine (version 1.2 - with modified Chinese Analyzer by Yiyi Sun)

All these projects have their own licenses, so make sure you check them before making non-personal use of any information that CoJaK presents to you. The author of CoJak cannot be responsible for your violation of these licenses. Keep in mind that CoJaK required about one week of work by one person, while the dictionaries have been brewing for years, involving hundreds of people and uncountable hours in front of computer screen. All involved have lovingly given the product of their labor to the public. Please do not abuse this trust!

How to Use It

You can choose between searching in just one Asian language, or in all three. The top box is for typing in characters (Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) using the input method of your operating system. The second box is for typing in alphabet scripts. The third is for English, and the last is for index information.

Typing in more that one box will add more restrictions to the search (a logical "and").

You can substitute "?" for single letters or numbers in the search. For example, searching for Pinyin "han?" will find all tones of han: han1, han2, han3, han4, han5. Use "*" for more than one letter. For example, searching for English "rad*" will find radish, radio, etc.

You can lookup characters in the result. Double click on the character column, and then drag the mouse pointer across the character or characters you want to look up.

Note that becase a number of dictionaries are integrated, duplicate information may appear. For example, single characters are defined in the Chinese character dictionary, and also in the Chinese word dictionary. Results from the Chinese character dictionary will include more information.

Download

Before installing CoJaK, make sure your machine can run Java. If you are not sure you have Java, you can first install CoJaK, and then install Java if it doesn't work. There is no need to install KoJaK again after that.

You also need CJK fonts. For Microsoft Windows, these are available for free here.

For Microsoft Windows, installation couldn't be easier. Download this file and run it:

CoJaK installer for Microsoft Windows

No simple installation is currently available for other operating systems (anyone care to help me with this?) but here's what you can do. First, download this file and unzip it:

CoJaK files

You must run CoJaK from that base directory, and include everything in the "lib" folder in the classpath (CoJaK expects the dictionary information to be available in the "index" folder). The class to run is gnu.cojak.CoJaK. Here's an example of the command line:

java -classpath lib\cojak.jar;lib\lucene-1.2.jar gnu.cojak.CoJaK

You will probably also want to edit the cojak-config.txt file with the names of your CJK fonts.

Source

Feel free to fool around with the code and improve it! Remeber that the license requires you to make your changes publically available. If you send your changes to me, I would be happy to host them on this web site. Make sure you mention my copyright (cleverly referred to as a "copyleft" by the GNU General Public License) to guarantee legal protection.

I recommend the Ant build tool to build the source, and you will need NSIS to build the Microsoft Windows installer. CoJaK source code is in this file:

CoJaK source

You may contact me at "tal liron at gmail dot com".

(Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.
Tal Liron and CoJaK are independent of Sun Microsystems, Inc.)