The Dai Kan-Wa jiten (大漢和辞典, "The Great Han–Japanese Dictionary") is a Japanese dictionary of kanji (Chinese characters) compiled by Morohashi Tetsuji. Remarkable for its comprehensiveness and size, Morohashi's dictionary contains over 50,000 character entries and 530,000 compound words. Haruo Shirane (2003:15) says: "This is the definitive dictionary of the Chinese characters and one of the great dictionaries of the world."
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Morohashi Tetsuji was originally motivated to create a dictionary in 1917 when he went to China to study Chinese. Trying to look up words in the largest available Chinese dictionaries was frustrating; the Kangxi Zidian defines characters but not phrases, the Peiwen Yunfu lists phrases without definitions, and the Zhonghua Da Zidian had just been published. Morohashi's autobiography explains (Wilkinson 2000:74) that "he had to spend between a quarter and a third of his study time trying to find the meanings of words and phrases. This tedium he felt could be avoided if there were a dictionary that provided both citations and definitions." When Morohashi returned to Japan in 1919, he had 20 notebooks filled with Chinese vocabulary.
In 1925, Suzuki Ippei (鈴木一平), president of the Taishukan publishing house, requested Morohashi to edit a comprehensive kanji dictionary of an unprecedented scale. In order to print this giant reference work, fonts for many rare characters had to be created, since none existed. The first volume was published in 1943, but the fire-bombing of Tokyo destroyed the printing plates and special fonts in 1945. After the war, Morohashi and his fellow editors reconstructed the dictionary from proofs. Due to a shortage of skilled craftsmen, Suzuki persuaded Ishii Mokichi (石井茂吉), inventor of phototypesetting, to recreate the necessary fonts. The first volume was published in 1955 and the final index volume in 1960. Morohashi was awarded the Order of the Chrysanthemum in 1957 and the Order of Culture in 1967 for his contributions to sinology and lexicography. Taishukan published a vocabulary index in 1990 and a supplemental volume in 2000.
The original (1955–1960) Dai Kan-Wa jiten has 13 volumes totaling 13,757 pages, and includes 49,964 head entries for characters, with over 370,000 words and phrases. This unabridged dictionary, often called the "Morohashi" in English, focuses upon Classical Chinese and Literary Chinese vocabulary. It provides encyclopedic information about poetry, book titles, historical figures, place names, Buddhist terms, and even modern expressions. The Dai Kan-Wa jiten is intended for reading Chinese and does not cover Japanese words created since the Meiji era.
This is the format for main character entries:
One archaism of the first edition is giving Japanese pronunciations of characters in historical kana usage rather than modern, retaining for instance now-obsolete ゐ i and ゑ e.
Each individual volume has a radical-and-stroke sorting index arranged by Chinese radical or signific (following the 214 Kangxi radicals), and subdivided by the total number of remaining strokes in the character. For Dai Kan-Wa jiten users unfamiliar with this traditional system of dictionary collation, the final index volume is an essential tool.
Volume 13 contains four indices to the dictionary, which cite volume and page numbers for each character.
Volume 13 also contains a Hoi (補遺, "Appendix") listing 1,062 Chinese characters that the dictionary uses in definitions but does not include as main entries, plus the official 1850 Japanese tōyō kanji for general use, and 517 simplified Chinese characters.
Since the death of Morohashi Tetsuji in 1982 at the age of 99, Taishukan has published two Dai Kan-Wa jiten augmentations that amount to Volumes 14 and 15.
The handy 1990 Goi sakuin (語彙索引, "Vocabulary Index") allows searching for words in Morohashi by their pronunciation in modern kana spelling, instead of the historical system used in Volumes 1-13. This index comprehensively lists every compound word listed in the main dictionary, including terms, phrases, four-character idioms, etc. Vocabulary is arranged in the standard gojūon (五十音, "fifty sound") ordering of kana, and is cited by volume and page numbers.
The 2000 Hokan (補巻, "Supplemental Volume") adds some 800 main character entries, approximately 33,000 new vocabulary terms, novel readings of characters, variant characters, etc. This last volume includes four types of character indexes. Like the Vocabulary Index, this supplement uses standard modern kana but also provides the historical equivalents.
Despite the competition from the CD-ROM version of the Hanyu Da Cidian, Taishukan has not released an electronic Dai Kan-Wa jiten edition. This owes not only to the dictionary's huge scale but also to the fact many of its 50,000 characters could not be encoded until recently.
The (1962–1968) Zhongwen Da Cidian, sometimes called the "Chinese Morohashi", is very similar in structure to Dai Kan-Wa jiten and was one of the most comprehensive Chinese dictionaries available until 1993.
In 1982, Taishukan published an abridged "family edition" of the Dai Kan-Wa jiten. Their four-volume Kō Kan-Wa jiten 広漢和辞典 ("Extensive Chinese–Japanese Dictionary") enters 20,769 characters and some 120,000 words. It adds early oracle bone script and bronzeware script examples, and proposes hypothetical Old Chinese etymologies and word families.
Kida Jun'ichirō wrote a Japanese book (1986) about the Dai Kan-Wa jiten, and edited another (1994) about lexicographers that discusses Morohashi's contributions (chap. 4) and Ishii's creation of characters (chap. 11).
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