About StrokeDex
StrokeDex is a small dex of kanji, focused on stroke order. Each kanji has an animation that draws it one stroke at a time, in the order it is written.
For now it covers the 1026 kanji taught in grades 1–6 of Japanese elementary school. The numbers 一 to 十 come first, and each grade's kanji are ordered by how common they are, with Grade 1 before Grade 2.
Watching stroke order
Each kanji page draws its stroke order as an animation, with a faint outline of the whole kanji behind it. The player has:
- Play, pause and replay. Replay starts again from a blank square.
- Previous and next buttons to step through one stroke at a time.
- A speed switch: 0.5×, 1× or 2×.
- Toggles for stroke numbers, the ghost outline and loop. With loop off, the animation stops at the end.
- A strip of every stroke below the player. Click one to show the kanji up to that stroke.
With focus inside the player, Space plays or pauses, and the arrow keys step back and forward. If reduced motion is on in your system settings, the animation doesn't start on its own. The whole kanji is shown, and pressing play shows one stroke at a time.
Searching
Type into the search box at the top of any page, or press / to jump to it. You can search by:
- the kanji itself, 七
- its English meaning, such as “seven”
- romaji, with or without long vowel marks: “nana”, “kyuu” or “kyū”
- hiragana or katakana: なな or ナナ
- its dex number: “7” or “007”
History and bookmarks
Each kanji you open is added to History, which keeps the last 50 kanji. To save one for later, press Bookmark on its page. Saved kanji are listed under Bookmarks.
History and bookmarks are kept only in this browser, in its localStorage. They don't sync between devices, and clearing this site's data in your browser removes them. Player settings, such as speed and toggles, are remembered the same way.
Credits
Stroke order paths come from KanjiVG by Ulrich Apel, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Readings, meanings, radical numbers, school grades and the old JLPT levels that the estimates are based on come from KANJIDIC2 by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG). They are used in line with the EDRDG licence, under CC BY-SA 4.0.
To make this site, stroke paths were extracted from the KanjiVG files and the two sources were combined. Romaji was generated from the kana readings, and radical names come from Unicode's Kangxi radical names. JLPT levels are estimates mapped from KANJIDIC2's pre-2010 levels, because there has been no official list since 2010.
The combined kanji data on this site is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Example words are hand-picked for this site. They are not taken from either source, and no licence is attached to them.
The site is built with Astro.