Inkah

Chinese & Korean pop-up dictionary browser extension. Hover over characters on any webpage to see definitions, transliterations, and more.

Features

• Pop-up dictionary — hover over Chinese or Korean text to see definitions, pinyin/romanization, and tone information
• Word saving — save words to a local database for later review
• Greedy longest-match tokenization — intelligently segments text to find the longest matching dictionary entries
• Korean lemma resolution — looks up conjugated Korean forms via lemma tables and the Vicon inflection dictionary
• Tone coloring — configurable tone color schemes for Chinese pinyin (Pleco, MDBG, Hanping, Nathan)
• Zhuyin/Bopomofo — optional Zhuyin display for Chinese
• Dark mode — full dark mode support for the popup dictionary
• Instant language swap — switch between Chinese and Korean without reloading

Supported Languages

Language	Dictionary	Entries	Features
Chinese (zh)	CC-CEDICT	191K	Pinyin, Zhuyin, tone colors, traditional + simplified
Korean (ko)	KEDict + Vicon	1M+	Revised Romanization, lemma resolution, conjugation lookup

Install

npm install

Development

# Start dev server with hot reload (opens Chrome with extension loaded)
npm run dev

# Build for production
npm run build

# Build for Firefox
npm run build:firefox

Load in Chrome manually

1. Run npm run build
2. Open chrome://extensions
3. Enable "Developer mode"
4. Click "Load unpacked" and select the .output/chrome-mv3 directory

Testing

# Unit tests (61 tests)
npm test

# E2E tests (headless Chrome with extension loaded)
npm run test:e2e

# Type checking
npm run typecheck

Architecture

Built with WXT (Vite-based extension framework) targeting Manifest V3.

src/
  entrypoints/
    background.ts        # Service worker — message handler, dict import, keepalive
    content.ts           # Content script — hover detection, popup rendering
    popup/               # Browser action popup — settings panel
  data/
    schema.ts            # Dexie 4 IndexedDB schema + cache warming
    dict-cache.ts        # In-memory read-through cache for dictionary lookups
    import-dictionaries.ts  # One-time JSON → IndexedDB batch import
    settings.ts          # Settings CRUD via chrome.storage
    words.ts             # Word save/delete/query via Dexie
    sentences.ts         # Sentence save/delete/query via Dexie
  search/
    search-chinese.ts    # Greedy longest-match with bulkGet batching
    search-korean.ts     # 3-source lookup (main + vicon + lemma) with batching
    search-composer.ts   # Language-aware search dispatcher
  messaging/
    handler.ts           # Background message router
    client.ts            # Content script sendToBackground helper
    types.ts             # Message type definitions
  lib/
    parse-chinese.ts     # Unicode detection, pinyin ↔ tone conversion, zhuyin
    parse-korean.ts      # Hangul detection, Revised Romanization
    parse-language.ts    # Language detection, tokenization helpers
    available-languages.ts  # Language config and tone presets

Dictionary Storage

Dictionaries are stored in IndexedDB via Dexie 4 (not in memory). On first install, JSON files are batch-imported into indexed tables. An in-memory read-through cache ensures sub-millisecond repeat lookups. The service worker stays alive via keepalive port connections from content scripts.

Metric	Value
First install import	~10s (1.3M entries)
Cold lookup (first access)	~300ms
Warm lookup (cached)	<1ms
Language swap	1-3ms
Build time	~1.5s

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on commits, branching, and code style.

License

MIT