About

Why "JiWiz"?

字 (ji) means "character" — so a "ji wiz" is someone who's a wiz at characters. It also happens to echo a good old-fashioned "gee whiz!"

Grandpa (aka "jiji" in Japanese) wrote this for his grandkids, but it's useful for adults, too!

What JiWiz does

JiWiz is a search tool for the ~6,700 kanji in the KanjiVG dataset — a way to find a character several different ways, and to see how it relates to others.

• Search by the kanji itself, a component it's built from, its reading (in kana or romaji), or its English meaning — all from the same box.
• Search by radical position name, like "sakana hen" or さかなへん, to find kanji built from a specific radical in a specific position — the same way a student would name one out loud.
• Filter by stroke count, school grade (elementary through Jōyō and Jinmeiyō), or by gojūon row — no need to type anything to browse.
• Filter by radical, in traditional stroke-count order, to browse every kanji built from a given component.
• Browse the full radical list — every kanji grouped by its classifying radical, in official Kangxi order, with readings and meaning, for browsing rather than searching.
• Browse vocabulary — list words from a dictionary of 176,000+ entries, filtered by part of speech, reading, or school grade level — a great way to pick up new vocabulary.
• Watch stroke order drawn out one stroke at a time, each in its own color, with optional numbering — placed at each stroke's actual starting point.
• Show its own radical name — see what a kanji is called (e.g. さかなへん) when it shows up as a radical inside other kanji.
• Find visually similar kanji — characters that look alike, based on which parts of the canvas their strokes actually occupy, not just shared components.
• Find kanji that share a component with the one you're looking at, straight from its detail view.