NihongoHover
Read Japanese with one Hover
Only for Mac
$5.99
Point at any Japanese word on your Mac and the reading, the meaning and an example sentence appear. No copying, no switching apps. One-time purchase.
Read Japanese without leaving what you're reading.
Nihongo Hover lives in your menu bar. Point at any Japanese word on a website, in a PDF, in a game and a small popup tells you what it means. No copy-pasting, no tab switching, no flow broken.
What you get:
Instant dictionary lookups anywhere on your screen
Furigana, romaji, and color-coded pitch accent
Inflected verbs and adjectives resolved to their dictionary form
Example sentences and kanji breakdowns
JLPT level badges, N5 to N1
One-tap flashcards with smart review, so the words you look up actually stick
Everything runs offline. The whole dictionary lives inside the app, nothing you read ever leaves your Mac, and there's no account to create.
Made by a learner, for learners.
more Every word now comes with something to learn from.
• Example sentences across the whole dictionary entries now have at least one. Hover almost anything and there is an example waiting.
• Every JLPT word now has at least three example sentences.
• A memory aid on practically every entry, built from the kanji it contains.
• Cleaner readings: example-sentence readings are now consistent across the corpus, so the romaji line reads the way the dictionary does.
1.2.2 Sep 21
Your deck now travels to your iPhone, the kanji breakdown says what each kanji means in this word, and the word window grew up.
SEND YOUR DECK TO KOI JLPT
The library toolbar has a "Send to Koi JLPT" sheet — AirDrop or save to a file, scoped to everything, favourites, or just what is due today. Cards, FSRS schedule, review history, favourites, notes and labels all travel, and re-sending the whole library is safe: the phone merges instead of duplicating. Settings → General has a matching export row next to the CSV one.
KANJI, GLOSSED IN CONTEXT
The breakdown under a word used to show each kanji's first dictionary meaning. It now shows the meaning the kanji carries in *that* word — 産 inside 財産 reads as "property", not "to give birth". Click any part to open it in the word window.
THE WORD WINDOW
• Write a note and set a colour label right in the window, without a detour through the editor
• Stability and Last reviewed joined the flashcard panel
• ⇧⌘W closes it from anywhere
• The radical-browse button no longer hides itself on kanji that build no other kanji but appear in plenty of words
READING AND BROWSING
• ⌥← and ⌥→ step through a sentence word by word, and no longer stall on a word the dictionary does not know
• Leaf through the dictionary by gojūon row あ, か, さ, た…
• Every JLPT-level word that resolves to a dictionary entry now has example sentences: 183,623 sentences across 62,954 headwords
• ⌘⇧G copies the whole passage from the last area capture, punctuation and line breaks kept
APPEARANCE
Fresh installs now open in Cactus, and the Cactus skins draw their rim around the whole window titlebar included at the native corner curve on macOS 26.
FIXED
• The popup pin ( ⌘⇧P) never held
• Dictionary browse repeated entries across page boundaries
• The Dock icon quietly lost detail for anyone who never touched the icon picker
• An idiom badge could vanish when the match was declined for another reason
• A performance guard could not actually fail, so a missing index would have gone unnoticed Für
1.2.1 Sep 17
Your deck now travels to your iPhone, the kanji breakdown says what each kanji means in this word, and the word window grew up.
SEND YOUR DECK TO KOI JLPT
The library toolbar has a "Send to Koi JLPT" sheet — AirDrop or save to a file, scoped to everything, favourites, or just what is due today. Cards, FSRS schedule, review history, favourites, notes and labels all travel, and re-sending the whole library is safe: the phone merges instead of duplicating. Settings → General has a matching export row next to the CSV one.
KANJI, GLOSSED IN CONTEXT
The breakdown under a word used to show each kanji's first dictionary meaning. It now shows the meaning the kanji carries in *that* word — 産 inside 財産 reads as "property", not "to give birth". Click any part to open it in the word window.
THE WORD WINDOW
• Write a note and set a colour label right in the window, without a detour through the editor
• Stability and Last reviewed joined the flashcard panel
• ⇧⌘W closes it from anywhere
• The radical-browse button no longer hides itself on kanji that build no other kanji but appear in plenty of words
READING AND BROWSING
• ⌥← and ⌥→ step through a sentence word by word, and no longer stall on a word the dictionary does not know
• Leaf through the dictionary by gojūon row あ, か, さ, た…
• Every JLPT-level word that resolves to a dictionary entry now has example sentences: 183,623 sentences across 62,954 headwords
• ⌘⇧G copies the whole passage from the last area capture, punctuation and line breaks kept
APPEARANCE
Fresh installs now open in Cactus, and the Cactus skins draw their rim around the whole window titlebar included at the native corner curve on macOS 26.
FIXED
• The popup pin ( ⌘⇧P) never held
• Dictionary browse repeated entries across page boundaries
• The Dock icon quietly lost detail for anyone who never touched the icon picker
• An idiom badge could vanish when the match was declined for another reason
• A performance guard could not actually fail, so a missing index would have gone unnoticed
1.2 Sep 9
Your deck now travels to your iPhone, the kanji breakdown says what each kanji means in this word, and the word window grew up.
SEND YOUR DECK TO KOI JLPT
The library toolbar has a "Send to Koi JLPT" sheet — AirDrop or save to a file, scoped to everything, favourites, or just what is due today. Cards, FSRS schedule, review history, favourites, notes and labels all travel, and re-sending the whole library is safe: the phone merges instead of duplicating. Settings → General has a matching export row next to the CSV one.
KANJI, GLOSSED IN CONTEXT
The breakdown under a word used to show each kanji's first dictionary meaning. It now shows the meaning the kanji carries in *that* word — 産 inside 財産 reads as "property", not "to give birth". Click any part to open it in the word window.
THE WORD WINDOW
• Write a note and set a colour label right in the window, without a detour through the editor
• Stability and Last reviewed joined the flashcard panel
• ⇧⌘W closes it from anywhere
• The radical-browse button no longer hides itself on kanji that build no other kanji but appear in plenty of words
READING AND BROWSING
• ⌥← and ⌥→ step through a sentence word by word, and no longer stall on a word the dictionary does not know
• Leaf through the dictionary by gojūon row あ, か, さ, た…
• Every JLPT-level word that resolves to a dictionary entry now has example sentences: 183,623 sentences across 62,954 headwords
• ⌘⇧G copies the whole passage from the last area capture, punctuation and line breaks kept
APPEARANCE
Fresh installs now open in Cactus, and the Cactus skins draw their rim around the whole window titlebar included at the native corner curve on macOS 26.
FIXED
• The popup pin ( ⌘⇧P) never held
• Dictionary browse repeated entries across page boundaries
• The Dock icon quietly lost detail for anyone who never touched the icon picker
• An idiom badge could vanish when the match was declined for another reason
• A performance guard could not actually fail, so a missing index would have gone unnoticed
1.1 Sep 8
Every word now comes with something to learn from.
• Example sentences across the whole dictionary entries now have at least one. Hover almost anything and there is an example waiting.
• Every JLPT word now has at least three example sentences.
• A memory aid on practically every entry, built from the kanji it contains.
• Cleaner readings: example-sentence readings are now consistent across the corpus, so the romaji line reads the way the dictionary does.
more Version 1.2.2 Sep 21
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.