Kōjien

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Kōjien (広辞苑, Kōjien^?) is a single-volume Japanese dictionary of around 3,000 pages, containing both modern and old Japanese words. Published by Iwanami Shoten, Kōjien literally means 'wide garden of words'. Like most Japanese dictionaries, the headwords are in hiragana, and the words are arranged in gojūon order. It is considered by many Japanese people to be the standard dictionary.

Kōjien was the brainchild of Izuru Shinmura (新村出 Shinmura Izuru, 1876-1967), a professor of linguistics and Japanese at Kyoto University. First published in 1955, Kōjien was an enlargement and improvement of Shinmura's Jien (辞苑), a much smaller dictionary originally published in 1935. Work on improving Jien began after World War II, in September 1948.

1 Shinmura Izuru
2 Characteristics of Kōjien
3 Editions
4 External links

[edit] Shinmura Izuru

Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Western Japan, in 1876, Shinmura Izuru graduated from Japan's elite Tokyo University, where he studied under (among others) Ueda Kazutoshi (上田万年), who was active in the creation and editing of dictionaries designed for use with foreign languages around the turn of the century. Shinmura became involved in the creation and editing of Japanese language dictionaries in the latter part of the Meiji era, at least in part because these activities corresponded to a degree with his own academic interests - he specialized in linguistics, especially the Japanese language. Though Shinmura died in 1967, he is still credited as the official editor on later editions of the dictionary.

[edit] Characteristics of Kōjien

First published in 1955, Kōjien has to date gone through five editions (see below). As Shinmura stated in the preface to the first edition, it was hoped at its conception that Kōjien would come to be regarded as the standard by which other dictionaries would be measured. This hope has largely been fulfilled; Kōjien is now widely regarded as the most authoritative single-volume Japanese language dictionary on the market. The first edition, containing approximately 200,000 definitions, is believed to have sold around one million copies in the fourteen years between its publication and revision. The subsequent four editions have accounted for approximately ten million sales between them, and have seen approximately 20,000 more words added to the initial number.

The Kōjien dictionary has a censorship policy, and taboo words such as sexual or very insulting terms are not recorded. The dictionary features a small number of illustrations (about one per page), and mini-biographies of notable people, as well as a kanji reference. The requirement for persons featured in Kōjien is that they be dead; the living are excluded from its pages.

Kōjien has been licensed by several makers of electronic dictionaries. Most models include it as the main Japanese-Japanese dictionary. Since 1993, it has also been made available in CD-ROM format.