A thread on this was closed back in 2015. I feel somewhat stupid to only now realize that we can search for idioms in most dictionaries. As the original thread points out, Jisho returns some idioms. The Japanese-Japanese dictionary that comes with the standard Mac OS Dictionary App (Daijirin) seems to have more idioms. For example, Jisho does not have an entry for 役を振る, the Daijirin returns 芝居・仕事などで，役目を割り当てる。For those who use iOS (iPhone, iPad), there is no native dictionary app but Monokakido has a dictionary app in / which you can buy the Daijirin, Shinmeikai, and other dictionaries (including kanji dictionaries). In the app one can search for idioms that use some kanji/word.
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You could just use the built-in dictionary. It’s serviceable in a pinch.
That’s the one I ended up getting as well.
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But with the built-in dictionary, as far as I know, please correct me if I’m wrong, you cannot:
- change the font-size of the entries displayed; 2) if you get an entry with words that you don’t know then you have to copy and paste them in some other document and then use the built-in dictionary again again. For these reasons, I find the built-in dictionary not convenient.
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I’ve found that part to be inconsistent. Sometimes you can just highlight parts of an entry and do recursive lookups and sometimes you can’t. I haven’t been able to figure out why.
But yes, it’s not ideal at all, but the one advantage is that you can do a quick lookup with a popover that doesn’t take you out of the app so I use both the built-in and 3rd party dictionaries.
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