[1][2][3] The dictionary files are free to use with attribution (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike[4]) and have been widely adopted on the Internet and are used in many computer and smartphone applications.
[2] The JMdict project was started by computational linguist Jim Breen in 1991 with the creation of EDICT (a plain text flat file in EUC-JP encoding), which was later expanded to a UTF-8-encoded XML file in 1999 as JMdict.
[5] An expanded version, EDICT2, which permits an entry to contain multiple headwords and readings as well as cross-references and additional fields, is also produced and is used by several systems including the server for WWWJDIC, Breen's own online dictionary search tool.
Since 2000, the JMdict project has been managed by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG).
[7] From June 2021, a version of JMdict includes example sentences selected from the Tatoeba Corpus.