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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Data & Attribution
Kanji stroke order data from the KanjiVG project, copyright © 2009–2026 Ulrich Apel. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The stroke data, component breakdown, and visual-similarity fingerprint used in this app are derived and adapted from KanjiVG's SVG files.
Readings, meanings, grade, and frequency data from KANJIDIC2, copyright © the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG) and James William Breen. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Romaji readings and gojuon-row groupings in this app are derived from KANJIDIC2's reading data.
Neither project endorses or is affiliated with this app.