Andrew Nelson

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Andrew Nathaniel Nelson (December 23, 1893 - May 17, 1975) was an American missionary and scholar of East Asian languages and literatures, best-known for his work in Japanese lexicography.

He was born in Great Falls, Montana to Swedish immigrant parents and earned his B.A. from Walla Walla College. In 1918, he began his long career of service in the Seventh-day Adventist missions of East Asia, where he gained particular distinction in the fields of general education and language training. The University of Washington awarded Nelson a Ph.D. in 1938 for his dissertation on The origin, history, and present status of the temples of Japan.

After retiring from missionary work in 1961, he was preoccupied with placing the finishing touches on his masterpiece, the Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary, which first appeared in print the following year. The work, which was posthumously revised and expanded by a team lead by John H. Haig at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was reissued in 1997 as The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary. It is one of the most authoritative Kanji dictionaries for English learners of the language, and displays particular sensitivity to the difficulties they may have with the Kangxi radical system traditionally used to classify Kanji.

Nelson died in Hong Kong.