(Associate Professor of Japanese Literature，University of Hawaii at Manoda)
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This dictionary lists approximately 500,000 words found in Japanese texts and documents under entry headings arranged in 50(gojū)-on order. For each entry meanings and usage are explained, actual examples of usage are presented whenever possible, and necessary notes are provided.
Entry items include general terms that have been used in daily life and recorded in documents by the Japanese people from antiquity, as well as dialectal and slang terms, technical terms in various fields such as law, economics, biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics, and also proper nouns, including names of places and people and titles of texts.
The entries in this dictionary consist of the following elements, included as appropriate in the following order:
In order to make this dictionary user-friendly for present-day users, headword forms and explanations are based on modern standards, including modern kana orthography.
Definitions of a given word are generally arranged in historical order; usage examples for each meaning are accompanied by the name of the text in which they appear along with the year of its composition or publication.
Usage examples have been selected from a broad range of sources including literary works and historical texts in various fields. The total number of examples cited is approximately one million.
Sources for usage examples range from works of antiquity to those of the Meiji,Taishō, and Shōwa periods. Chinese texts are also used for Sino-Japanese terms, proverbs (kotowaza), etc.
Examples are taken from the most reliable versions of source texts; in cases where variant versions are cited, notice is given.
Sources of examples are identified as specifically as possible. To help the user identify the historical period and the field with which the term is associated, some examples also specify the name of the author and the field concerned.
In addition to definitions and usage examples, further explanations are provided, when necessary, in the sections for supplementary notes, miscellaneous lexical information, dialectal usages, etymology, pronunciation, special kana orthography for old Japanese, dictionary, kanji orthography, and homonymous kun characters.