Priority Information

Information about the relative priority of the entry consists of codes indicating the word appears in various references which can be taken as an indication of the frequency with which the word is used. This field is intended for use either by applications which want to concentrate on entries of a particular priority, or to generate subset files.

The current values in this field are:- news1/2: appears in the "wordfreq" file compiled by Alexandre Girardi from the Mainichi Shimbun. (See the Monash ftp archive for a copy.) Words in the first 12,000 in that file are marked "news1" and words in the second 12,000 are marked "news2".- ichi1/2: appears in the "Ichimango goi bunruishuu", Senmon Kyouiku Publishing, Tokyo, 1998. (The entries marked "ichi2" were demoted from ichi1 because they were observed to have low frequencies in the WWW and newspapers.)- spec1 and spec2: a small number of words use this marker when they are detected as being common, but are not included in other lists.- gai1/2: common loanwords, based on the wordfreq file.- nfxx: this is an indicator of frequency-of-use ranking in the wordfreq file. "xx" is the number of the set of 500 words in which the entry can be found, with "01" assigned to the first 500, "02" to the second, and so on. (The entries with news1, ichi1, spec1 and gai1 values are marked with a "(P)" in the EDICT and EDICT2 files.)

The reason both the kanji and reading elements are tagged is because on occasions a priority is only associated with a particular kanji/reading pair.