About This Dictionary
This site hosts a searchable database of over 11,000 Japanese manga sound effects (onomatopoeia) drawn from Yen Press’s published catalog, paired with the English translations used by professional translators and editors. It is designed as a practical reference for editors, translators, and anyone working with manga SFX in a professional context.
The entries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Rather than specifying a single “correct” translation for a given SFX, the dictionary records how professionals have actually rendered each sound across a range of published titles — giving you attested precedents and a sense of the possible translation landscape for each entry.
Please note that this tool uses Yen Press’s approach for transcribing chōonpu (the long vowel mark in Japanese) in the context of sound effects. Yen Press style sheets require that chōonpu be represented as two repetitions of the preceding vowel in SFX; for example, in a book that uses the standard Yen Press style, どー might be flagged as “dooo (boom)”. The search function on this site automatically regularizes katakana and hiragana input, so どー will find “dooo” as an exact match.
Search (Home)
Look up any SFX by hiragana, katakana, or romanization. Exact matches are highlighted; phonetically adjacent entries are surfaced as suggestions.
Reverse Search
Start from an English translation and find which Japanese SFX have been rendered that way — useful for exploration and discovery, possibly also useful for English to Japanese translation.
Insights: Scatter Plot
A visualization mapping SFX by translation diversity (how many English renderings they have) and commonness (how widely shared those renderings are across the dataset).
Insights: Clustering Network
A force-directed graph showing semantic neighborhoods — uses English translations to locate Japanese SFX in a semantic space and identify relationships.
Contributors
Rory Nevins
Site Creator & Editor, Yen Press
Rory Nevins is the creator of this site and is currently an Assistant Editor at Yen Press in the Manga department. He graduated from the University of Chicago, where he studied East Asian history as well as the philosophy and culture surrounding the concept of immortality. He also served as Managing Editor of Euphony, UChicago’s oldest student-run literary magazine.
These days, he can be found attending reading groups with friends, writing, mucking around in cyberspace, and neglecting a large number of other irons in the fire. Rory is only a hobbyist when it comes to web development and linguistics; he takes responsibility for — and is not surprised by — any disastrous issues you may encounter on this website.
Yen Press
Publisher
Yen Press is one of the largest English-language publishers of manga and light novels in North America, publishing titles across a wide range of genres. A subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Yen Press has been localizing Japanese comics and fiction since 2006 and is home to many of the most widely read manga titles in the English-speaking world.
Yen Press kindly provided the data for this site and supported its development. Thanks to Yen Press’s approach to localizing manga sound effects (tagging the Japanese text with both romanized and translated versions), their archive allowed for the efficient creation of what is likely the largest and best dataset of this kind.
History
The website you are using now began as a private tool and developed to its current form thanks to the generous support of Yen Press.
This dictionary began as a personal project — a private tool built by Rory Nevins when he found existing SFX reference resources inadequate for researching rare terms and brainstorming renderings for ambiguous sound effects. The initial dataset was assembled by programmatically extracting and cataloguing sound effects from the texts he worked on in his capacity as a manga editor at Yen Press.
What started as a private lookup tool soon acquired a full search interface, then a reverse-search tool, then the Insights visualizations — a gradual accretion of usability features and personal explorations. Once the project was feature-complete, it became clear that it was a valuable resource that should be shared with others, and that could be made even more valuable with access to a larger dataset.
Rory’s private tool was presented to Yen Press leadership. The company adopted it as an official internal tool — accessible to staff editors and authorized freelancers — and commissioned its development as the resource you are using now. As part of this development, Rory was granted permission to scan the company's entire catalog of manga for sound effects. The complex licensing situation of the resulting dataset currently requires that access to this tool be restricted to Yen Press employees and authorized partners.