goo dictionary

» see dictionary.goo.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

goo dictionary opened in 1999, two years into the portal that housed it, and it did one thing for twenty-six years. You typed a word and it looked that word up across everything it had licensed, which by the end came to around thirty dictionaries out of Sanseido and Shogakukan. Japanese definitions and a thesaurus, plus English going in both directions. No account and no charge.

Free reference on the web is always somebody else's paper being rented. The dictionaries were not NTT's work and never became NTT's property, and the whole service was a licensing arrangement with a search interface bolted on top. That arrangement held up through three changes of operator, from NTT ME Information Distribution to NTT Resonant in 2004 and then to NTT Docomo when Resonant was folded into the parent.

On 14 May 2025 NTT Docomo posted a notice saying the service would end at one in the afternoon on 25 June. It apologized for the shortness of the warning and thanked users for twenty-six years of patronage. It did not say why. Six weeks later the box stopped answering.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the box could do ~

The feature people mourned loudest was the least glamorous one. goo dictionary matched on the front of a word or the back of it, so you could ask what starts with this or what ends with this and get a list, which is how you work when you only have half a word. Dictionary apps mostly do exact lookup and fuzzy suggestion. This did the thing a printed index does, at web speed, for nothing.

I cannot read the content. My honest relationship to a Japanese dictionary site is the same as most people's relationship to a library in a city they have never visited, which is that you assume it is open. What I recognize is the shape: a free reference utility on a portal, running quietly for a quarter century on money that came from somewhere else entirely.

~ the notice ~

No reason was given, and that is worth recording rather than filling in. Japanese coverage from ITmedia to the trade blogs all landed on the same sentence, that the company had not disclosed why. The context arrived in stages afterward. Midori no goo had gone on 17 June, Oshiete! goo would go on 17 September, goo blog on 18 November, and the portal itself at one in the afternoon on 25 November.

Read backward from November, the dictionary was the second piece out of a structure that came down across the whole year. In May none of that was visible. What users had was a notice with a date on it and six weeks of warning.

~ the links that broke ~

A dictionary that ran from 1999 gets cited. Twenty-six years of blog posts and school pages point at dictionary.goo.ne.jp for the meaning of a word, and every one of those references now goes nowhere. One comment that circulated after the announcement put it as knowledge draining out of the Japanese-language web, which is more or less what a link rot event looks like from inside.

The traffic went to Weblio, which aggregates several hundred dictionaries, and to Kotobank, which is run by Asahi Shimbun with Shogakukan and Kodansha content. Both are good. Neither is the address written into two decades of other people's sentences.

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