Credits and licenses
The open data, fonts and code Kiku is built on, who made them, and the terms each comes under.
Dictionary data
Kiku keeps adapted copies of three open datasets, planned for looking up words and kanji and for checking Kiku's own items. No screen shows them yet.
Japanese-English dictionary file.
Kiku uses the JMdict dictionary files. These files are the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, and are used in conformance with the Group's licence.
- Copyright
- James William Breen and the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) (the copyright holder's terms)
- Release used
- 2026-10-08
- What Kiku keeps
- 218,875 entries: written forms, readings, English glosses, part of speech, common-word flags and newspaper frequency bands. Kiku leaves out 441 English strings that its language checks block; the rest of each entry is kept.
- Kiku's copy
- Adapted by Kiku and shared under the same license: license, source and changes.
Kanji dictionary file.
Kiku uses the KANJIDIC2 dictionary file. This file is the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, and is used in conformance with the Group's licence.
- Copyright
- James William Breen and the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) (the copyright holder's terms)
- Release used
- 2026-10-08
- What Kiku keeps
- 13,108 characters: on and kun readings, English meanings, stroke counts, school grades and newspaper frequency ranks. Kiku leaves out 19 English strings that its language checks block; the rest of each entry is kept.
- Kiku's copy
- Adapted by Kiku and shared under the same license: license, source and changes.
Stroke order drawings.
Stroke order data from KanjiVG, copyright Ulrich Apel, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.
- Copyright
- Ulrich Apel
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Release used
- 2026-07-14
- What Kiku keeps
- 6,703 characters (kanji, kana and some symbols): each stroke as an SVG path, in stroke order.
- Kiku's copy
- Adapted by Kiku and shared under the same license: license, source and changes.
Fonts
Each is used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and served from Kiku itself. The Japanese font is cut down to the characters Kiku uses.
- BIZ UDPGothic, for Japanese text. Copyright 2022 The BIZ UDGothic Project Authors. License
- BIZ UDMincho, for Japanese example sentences. Copyright 2022 The BIZ UDMincho Project Authors. License
- Atkinson Hyperlegible, for English text. Copyright 2020 Braille Institute of America, Inc. License
- IBM Plex Mono, for numbers and timers. Copyright 2017 IBM Corp., Reserved Font Name “Plex”. License
Code
- Preact, MIT License.
- preact-iso, MIT License.