The Best English-Japanese Dictionary for Learners: Why Wisdom Is My Top Pick After 8 Years of Studying English

What dictionary do you use for English?

Suitman has been memorizing English words with Anki (a flashcard app) for about eight years. In the early days, one small thing kept bugging me: when I made a card, where should I look up words I didn’t know? There are lots of free online dictionaries, right? In Japan, the big ones are Weblio and Eijiro.

You might think, “Aren’t all dictionaries basically the same?” I thought so too at first. But each dictionary words its definitions a little differently, and even lists them in a different order.

Some dictionaries give you the bare minimum, and others go into great detail. Every dictionary has its own character.

To get straight to the point: Suitman’s number one recommendation is the Wisdom English-Japanese Dictionary.

And I didn’t find it at a bookstore or in a “best dictionaries” article online. I found it through Look Up on my iPhone.

In this post, I’ll walk you through it in order: the days when I used free online dictionaries, how I found Wisdom and ended up buying the paper version, and how I make my word cards today.

At first, I used free online dictionaries

When I started using Anki, I had to figure out how to turn words I didn’t know into cards.

If you search for an English word in Japan, the top results are usually Weblio and Eijiro. Both are free online dictionaries (with plenty of ads).

At first, I found Eijiro especially easy to read, so I looked up meanings there and typed them into Anki myself. By hand, one card at a time.

The problem was pronunciation

I didn’t think much of it at first, but something started to bother me: pronunciation.

Those dictionaries show phonetic symbols and katakana readings (katakana is the Japanese script used to write foreign words). As a beginner, I was grateful for that and practiced with them. But all I could put on my Anki cards was the katakana. I couldn’t hear the real sound.

If you type a word into Google Translate and press the speaker icon, you can hear it. But it sounded really robotic (；´Д｀A

I kept wondering how I could make word cards while listening to the sound. But I didn’t know enough to set that up properly, so I put my energy into just making lots of cards.

Look Up on my iPhone led me to a super clear dictionary

Then one day…

I was reading an English article on my iPhone. When you long-press a word you don’t know, it gets highlighted and a menu pops up. If you tap Look Up there, you can check the meaning right on the spot.

When I tapped it, a super clear dictionary came up. (　ﾟдﾟ)

It showed which prepositions go with a word and which words it’s usually combined with. The layout was easy to understand at a glance.

I wondered, “What dictionary is this?” and looked it up. It was the Wisdom English-Japanese Dictionary. It had been on my iPhone from the start.

I saw the paper version at a bookstore and thought, “This is it”

The Wisdom English-Japanese Dictionary is published by Sanseido, a Japanese dictionary publisher.

When I found the paper version at a bookstore, I thought, “This is it.” It was the same dictionary I’d been using on my iPhone: easy to read, with lots of definitions.

You might wonder, “If it’s already on the iPhone, why buy the paper one?” But buying the paper dictionary comes with one more nice perk (I’ll get to that later).

I bought it before COVID, around 2019 or 2020, I think (I don’t really remember, lol). The one I have is the 4th edition, published in 2019.

What helped me the most

What’s great about this dictionary is that it covers the fine details.

• It explains subtle nuances as they are
• It tells you when a word is used “in formal writing” or “in formal situations”
• It tells you when a word is “mainly used in negative contexts”
• It shows syllable breaks and stress marks clearly
• It shows prepositions, and for transitive verbs, even where the object goes
• It lists lots of definitions

It doesn’t just list meanings. It’s designed so that you can easily picture when and how to use each word. That really helped me a lot.

The “web edition” you get with the paper dictionary is great

Another great thing about Wisdom is that there’s a web edition only for people who bought the paper dictionary (Dual Wisdom English-Japanese Dictionary).

You register an account first. Then, as proof that you own the dictionary, you answer a question that only someone with the book in hand could answer, like “What word is on page such-and-such?” After that, you can use the web edition.

My favorite part of the web edition is that you can hear the real pronunciation right away.

For someone who had been memorizing pronunciation in katakana for so long, this was a huge help.

It also shows syllable breaks and phonetic symbols, which makes it very easy to understand.

There are other handy features too, such as:

• The example-sentence corpus: you can search every example sentence in the dictionary to see which words come before and after a word
• The quiz-making feature: you can turn the example sentences you find into fill-in-the-blank or word-order quizzes (with Japanese translations)

Honestly, I haven’t mastered all of them. But the website is really well made, and even figuring out how to use it was fun ♪( ´▽｀)

Even now, when I come across a word I don’t know, I often open Wisdom. Not the paper book, but the web edition. Only people who bought the dictionary can use it, so it really is a buyer’s perk. Wisdom also opens on my iPhone, so I use it from my phone a lot too.

Oh, by the way: the app “Wisdom English-Japanese & Japanese-English Dictionary 2” (by Monokakido) on the App Store is a set of the 3rd edition of the English-Japanese dictionary and the 2nd edition of the Japanese-English dictionary, so it seems to be a different edition from the latest 4th edition. Be careful when you buy it.

You can even make quizzes from the example sentences

The web edition even has a feature that turns the dictionary’s example sentences into English quizzes. It seems to have been made for English teachers creating short tests, but it looks useful for your own review too.

Here’s how it works (the site is in Japanese, so I’ve added the button names in Japanese):

1. In the example-sentence corpus, enter the word or phrase you want to quiz yourself on and search for example sentences
2. Press the “問題作成” (Make Quiz) button
3. Choose the type of quiz: cloze test (fill in the blank) or word-order test (put the words in order)
4. Check the example sentences you want to use and press “問題出力” (Export Quiz)
5. The quiz is saved as a text file

For a cloze test, the word you searched for becomes a blank (　). For a word-order test, the words in each sentence come out shuffled. And both come with Japanese translations.

If you paste the text into the Word template the site offers, it turns into a ready-to-use test sheet.

There are also a few tricks for searching:

• Connect words with +, like “look+forward+to,” to search for phrases of two or more words
• Separate words with |, like “big|large|huge,” to see example sentences for similar words together and compare how they’re used
• Add an asterisk (*), like “look*,” to find looks, looked, looking and so on in one search (the English-Japanese search only matches the exact form you type, so this is handy)

Who knew a dictionary could do all this? lol

You can find more details on Sanseido’s guide to using the example-sentence corpus (in Japanese). That page was made around 2007–2008 (back in the 2nd edition days), so it’s pretty old, lol. But when I checked in October 2026, the screens and button names were still the same.

Now I leave card-making to Claude Code

And now…

I’ve handed the actual work of making word cards over to Claude Code (a tool where you can ask AI to do tasks for you). When I give it a word I don’t know, it makes a card with the meaning, example sentences and similar words, and the pronunciation is audio created with the Mac’s text-to-speech feature (a Siri voice).

When I flip a card and press the “R” key, the audio plays.

The links along the top (Google, Images, YouGlish, example sentences and more) are ones I add to each card myself, so I can jump straight to them when I want to dig deeper into a word.

I wrote about how I built this system, and about how this audio got cut off at the end when I used earphones, in these posts (both in Japanese): handing my Anki card-making over to Claude Code and Anki audio cut off with Bluetooth earphones.

Summary: Wisdom is my top dictionary pick

To sum up Suitman’s dictionary story:

• At first, I used free online dictionaries and wrote pronunciation down in katakana
• The clear dictionary that came up with Look Up on my iPhone was the Wisdom English-Japanese Dictionary
• It covers nuance, formality, whether a word is negative, prepositions and even where the object goes, so it’s easy to picture how to use each word
• Buying the paper dictionary also gives you a web edition where you can hear real pronunciation

When it comes to dictionaries, Wisdom is my number one pick. If you’re curious, try opening it once with Look Up on your iPhone. If you like it, I hope you’ll pick up the paper version too.

English expressions from this post (B2–C1)

Suitman is working toward Eiken Grade 1 (the top level of Japan’s best-known English test), so here are a few useful phrases from this post, picked out by AI.

① look up (= to find information in a dictionary, etc.)

I looked up the word on my iPhone and found a very clear dictionary.

The iPhone button is called Look Up, too. You’ll also often see the object in the middle, as in “look the word up.”

② connotation (= the feeling or idea a word suggests)

This word often has a negative connotation, so I avoid it in emails.

When a dictionary says a word is “mainly used in negative contexts,” this is what it means. Two words can share a meaning but leave a good or bad impression.

③ formal register (= a formal style of language)

The dictionary tells you when a word belongs to a formal register.

Register is how formal your language is, depending on the situation. Words marked “used in formal writing” belong to the formal register.

Dictionaries I used to check the meanings:

• look up｜Cambridge Dictionary
• connotation｜Cambridge Dictionary
• register｜Cambridge Dictionary

References

• Wisdom English-Japanese Dictionary, 4th edition (Sanseido, in Japanese)
• Dual Wisdom example-sentence corpus: how to use it (Sanseido, in Japanese)