The EDICT file is the outcome of a voluntary project to produce a
freely available Japanese-English Dictionary in machine readable form.
This project has been under way since early 1991, beginning with the
small original file included with the MOKE (Mark's Own Kanji Editor)
Japanese word processing package. It had reached a size of nearly
103,000 entries when it was split into two files: EDICT containing the
"normal" dictionary entries, and ENAMDICT containing names. Both files
are used by a number of software packages and thousands of users
worldwide. The EDICT file now has over 60,000 entries and the ENAMDICT
file has over 160,000 entries.

Meanwhile, there are also some additional dictionary files for special
purposes, COMPDIC, for example, for words from the computing and
communication field.