mecab-ko-dic

What it is and what it does

mecab-ko-dic is a Korean morphological dictionary packaged for Python to work with the MeCab tokenizer. It enables splitting and analyzing Korean text into meaningful tokens (morphemes) rather than simple space-based word boundaries. The package wraps dictionary data created by Yongwoon Lee and Yungho Yu, originally designed for use with MeCab's Japanese support but adapted for Korean.

The package is a thin wrapper that provides the dictionary and configuration arguments needed to initialize MeCab for Korean text processing. It is intended primarily for projects that already use MeCab (for example, in Japanese NLP pipelines) and need consistent Korean tokenization interoperability. The maintainers acknowledge MeCab was not originally designed for Korean and suggest other tools may be better suited for Korean-only NLP tasks.

Use it for:

• Tokenizing Korean text in a multilingual NLP pipeline that already uses MeCab for Japanese.
• Extracting consistent morphological tokens from Korean text for frequency analysis or vocabulary lookup.
• Integrating Korean language support into wordfreq or similar frequency-based text analysis tools.
• Processing Korean text in legacy systems built around MeCab that require interoperability.

Worth the install?

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

Provides a Korean dictionary for MeCab tokenization, enabling morphological analysis of Korean text when used with mecab-python3 or fugashi.

No. The package is abandoned (last update 2021-02-19, repository archived), has high install friction due to compiled dependencies, and the maintainers themselves recommend other tools for Korean NLP unless MeCab interoperability is a hard requirement. License metadata is also unclear. Only install if you have an existing MeCab-based pipeline that specifically needs Korean support and cannot migrate.

Install

mecab-ko-dic on PyPI

pip install mecab-ko-dic

uv add mecab-ko-dic

poetry add mecab-ko-dic

Installing mecab-ko-dic

Before you install

High install friction due to compiled dependencies (mecab-ko-dic-1.0.0.tar.gz). Package is abandoned as of 2021-02-19 with no updates since initial release; the repository is archived.

License in practice

License treatment is unclear in the metadata, though the description states the dictionary data and code are released under Apache License 2.0. Verify the actual license terms before use in proprietary projects.

Quickstart

pip install mecab-ko-dic

import MeCab
import mecab_ko_dic
tagger = MeCab.Tagger(mecab_ko_dic.MECAB_ARGS)
print(tagger.parse("안녕하세요세계."))

Requires MeCab and mecab-python3 (or fugashi) to be installed and properly configured on the system; MeCab is a compiled C++ library with system-level dependencies.

Verify before relying

• Whether the package works with current versions of mecab-python3 or fugashi given the 2021 freeze.
• Actual license metadata clarity—description claims Apache 2.0 but license_treatment is marked unclear.
• Whether Korean NLP has better maintained alternatives for modern use cases.

Package facts

Evidence: mecab-ko-dic-1.0.0.tar.gz

Tags

More Linguistic packages