Draw a kanji

Draw the kanji on the board above, one stroke at a time, exactly as you would write it on paper. After each stroke the recognizer compares what you have drawn — the shape of every stroke, the direction you drew it in and the order you drew them in — against all 2136 jōyō kanji, and updates the list of matches underneath. You do not need to finish the character: three or four strokes are often enough to bring the right kanji to the top.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and no app is required to use it — which makes this the quickest way to look up a kanji you have seen somewhere and cannot type, whether it came off a menu, a sign, a manga panel or a tattoo. Tap any match to open its full entry.

Handwriting recognition for kanji leans heavily on stroke order and stroke direction, the same way a Japanese reader does when deciphering someone's handwriting. If your character is not showing up, the order you drew it in is the most likely reason.

Four things to try, in order: draw the character large so it fills the board, because small drawings blur short strokes together; write each stroke in one continuous motion instead of retracing it; check that your stroke count matches the real character, since an extra or missing stroke moves the kanji a long way down the list; and follow the standard stroke order — generally top to bottom, left to right, horizontal before vertical, with any enclosing box closed last.

Every match opens a full kanji page: the character animated stroke by stroke, a numbered stroke-order strip you can follow along with, its meanings, its on and kun readings, its JLPT level and stroke count, and example words that use it with furigana and translations. It is the same reference data the KanjiPad app uses, so what you look up here is what you will practise there.