mecab-ko

What it is and what it does

mecab-ko is a Python binding for MeCab-ko, a morphological analyzer designed specifically for Korean text. It breaks Korean sentences into morphemes (the smallest meaningful units) and assigns part-of-speech tags to each token. The package ships with precompiled wheels for macOS, Linux, and Windows, and automatically installs mecab-ko-dic, a Korean dictionary required for analysis.

The wrapper follows MeCab's own API closely rather than adopting Pythonic conventions, so it reads like a direct port. You instantiate a Tagger with optional command-line arguments (e.g., "-Owakati" for space-separated output), then call parse() on Korean text to get morphological breakdowns. It's commonly used in Korean NLP pipelines, text preprocessing, and linguistic research where accurate Korean tokenization is essential.

Use it for:

• Tokenize and tag Korean text for downstream NLP tasks like sentiment analysis or named-entity recognition
• Build Korean search engines or text indexing systems that require morpheme-level analysis
• Preprocess Korean corpora for machine learning or linguistic research
• Segment Korean text into words when space-delimited boundaries are ambiguous or absent
• Extract lemmas and part-of-speech information for Korean language learning or grammar analysis tools

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Python wrapper for MeCab-ko, a morphological analyzer that tokenizes and tags Korean text into parts of speech and lemmas.

Yes, if you need Korean morphological analysis. The package is mature, has no known vulnerabilities, uses a permissive license, and benefits from well-maintained upstream projects. Install friction is moderate but manageable with prebuilt wheels. Maintenance is aging (last release 325 days ago), so verify that the version and dictionary meet your needs before committing to production use. Not suitable if you need active, frequent updates or support for other languages.

Install

mecab-ko on PyPI

pip install mecab-ko

uv add mecab-ko

poetry add mecab-ko

Installing mecab-ko

Before you install

Medium install friction due to compiled wheels for multiple platforms and architectures. Maintenance is aging—last release was 325 days ago, though the repository remains active with recent commits. Windows users must install Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable separately.

License in practice

Distributed under permissive BSD license, allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions. Dual-licensed under GPL v2 and LGPL v2.1 as alternatives.

Quickstart

pip install mecab-ko

import mecab_ko as MeCab
tagger = MeCab.Tagger("-Owakati")
result = tagger.parse("아버지가방에들어가신다").split()
print(result)  # ['아버지', '가', '방', '에', '들어가', '신다']

Windows requires Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable. macOS Big Sur requires pip 20.3 or higher. mecab-ko-dic dictionary is automatically installed as a runtime dependency.

Verify before relying

• Whether the package works reliably with Python 3.6 and 3.7 despite wheel evidence only showing 3.8–3.13 support
• Current maintenance cadence and likelihood of future updates beyond the aging status indicator

Package facts

Evidence: mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp310-cp310-macosx_10_9_universal2.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp310-cp310-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp310-cp310-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp310-cp310-manylinux2014_aarch64.manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp310-cp310-manylinux2014_x86_64.manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp310-cp310-win_amd64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp311-cp311-macosx_10_9_universal2.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp311-cp311-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp311-cp311-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp311-cp311-manylinux2014_aarch64.manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp311-cp311-manylinux2014_x86_64.manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp312-cp312-macosx_10_13_universal2.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp312-cp312-macosx_10_13_x86_64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp312-cp312-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp312-cp312-manylinux2014_aarch64.manylinux_2_17_aarch64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp312-cp312-manylinux2014_x86_64.manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp312-cp312-win_amd64.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp313-cp313-macosx_10_13_universal2.whl; mecab_ko-1.0.2-cp313-cp313-macosx_10_13_x86_64.whl

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