Jim Breen

For the rugby player, see Jim Breen (rugby league).

James William Breen (born 1947) was, until July 2025, a Research Fellow at Monash University in Australia, where he was a professor in the area of IT and telecommunications before his retirement in 2003.^[1] He holds a BSc in mathematics, an MBA and a PhD in computational linguistics, all from the University of Melbourne. He is well known for his involvement in several popular free Japanese-related projects: the EDICT and JMDict Japanese–English dictionaries, the KANJIDIC kanji dictionary, and the WWWJDIC portal which provides an interface to search them.^[1][2][3]

James William Breen BSc (Melb), MBA (Melb), PhD (Melb), AMusA (AMEB), RSA
Born	1947 (age 77–78)
Other names	Jim Breen
Occupation(s)	Head of the Department of Digital Systems, Monash University
Known for	WWWJDIC
Title	Professor
Board member of	Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University
Academic background
Education	University of Melbourne, Australian Music Examinations Board
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Thesis	Extraction of neologisms from Japanese corpora (2017)
Doctoral advisor	Tim Baldwin
Academic work
Discipline	computing and information systems
Sub-discipline	digital and data communications
Institutions	Chisholm Institute of Technology, University of Melbourne
Website	https://www.edrdg.org/~jwb/

His EDICT dictionary and WWWJDIC server have been described as "reliable and close to comprehensive".^[1] The 210,000-term lexicon is used by popular apps such as ImiWa (iOS) and AEDict (Android), and has been used to build other Japanese language learning sites such as Rikai and Jisho.org.^[1]

He was a board member of the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash University.^[4]