19 Facts About Japanese dictionaries

Japanese dictionaries have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries.

Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic dictionaries.

In contrast, the Japanese dictionaries writing system, with kanji, hiragana, and katakana, creates complications for dictionary ordering.

Japanese writing system originated with the introduction of Chinese characters around the 4th century CE, and early Japanese dictionaries developed from Chinese dictionaries circa the 7th century CE.

Japanese dictionaries followed the Chinese example of reducing the number of radicals: original 540, adjusted 542, condensed 214, and abridged 189.

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Japanese onbiki dictionaries historically changed from poetic iroha to practical gojuon ordering around 1890.

Japanese dictionaries lexicography flowered during the Heian Period, when Chinese culture and Buddhism began to spread throughout Japan.

Japanese bunruitai semantic collation of dictionaries began with the 938 CE Wamyo Ruijusho, compiled by Minamoto no Shitago.

All three of these onbiki Japanese dictionaries adapted the bunruitai method to collate primarily by first syllable and secondarily by semantic field.

Development of early Japanese lexicography from Chinese–Japanese dictionaries has cross-linguistic parallels, for instance, early English language lexicography developed from Latin–English dictionaries.

Nonetheless, modern Japanese lexicography adapted to an unparalleled second foreign wave from Western language dictionaries and romanization.

Japanese dictionaries's revised 5-volume Daigenkai dictionary continues to be cited for its definitions and etymologies.

Medium single-volume Japanese dictionaries have comparative advantages in portability, usability, and price.

Some Japanese dictionaries publishers sell both a larger dictionary with more archaisms and classical citations as well as a smaller condensation with more modern examples, for instance, Shogakukan's Daijisen and Gendai Kokugo Reikai Jiten.

However, the Beginner's Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese dictionaries Characters, edited by Arthur Rose-Innes is not the only one reprinted by Dover for it reprinted the 1959 edition.

Since specialized Japanese dictionaries are too diverse and numerous to be covered here, four exemplary types are reviewed: dictionaries of old words, current words, loanwords, and thesauri.

Three publishers put out annual paperback Japanese dictionaries that cover the latest native coinages and foreign borrowings.

General denshi jisho meaning of "dictionary database software" has evolved from early floppies that Japanese users copied onto their local computers to web-based dictionaries accessible by users through the Internet.

Many online dictionaries of Japanese are based upon Jim Breen's voluntary EDICT Project, which consists of the 170,000 entry-strong core JMdict and EDICT files, and associated files such as KANJIDIC for kanji.