広辞苑（Kōjien）

by Izuru Shinmura

K?jien

Genres: Japanese Literature

3049 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Izuru Shinmura (新村 出) was a Japanese linguist and essayist, best known for his magnum opus Kōjien, the most authoritative single-volume dictionary of Japanese.

Reviews

[owlette · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF-ed at page 142 (last entry "イズミル"). I started this project of reading a dictionary cover to cover with my sister to expand our Japanese vocabulary. The point is simply to gain exposure because there's a big difference between knowing a word and not knowing that it exists. What better way to learn Japanese in rawdog style than to read the most famous Japanese dictionary cover to cover? Well, I'm here to say, a little bit shame-faced, that Kōjien was not the right choice for this endeavor.

First of all, Kōjien is not a learner's dictionary; it's a full-size/collegiate dictionary that covers proper nouns, (some) jargons, and classical Japanese (古典語). The biggest difficulty was the inclusion of the third type because I can't read the classical Japanese of the example sentences, a lot of which come from The Tale of Genji 『源氏物語』, one of, if not the most, difficult classical Japanese text. It would be really cool if I could, but I can't be spending two hours per page because I'm looking up lines from The Tale of Genji on every other entry.

Second, Kōjien does not include grammatical guidance except for verb conjugation type. I find gramamtical information as important as the definition, so a dictionary that omits them is a no from me even if I wasn't reading it cover to cover.

Third and most importantly, the definitions---at least of the 5th edition that I read--- suck. They get get cyclical very quickly, they are simplistic to the point of being imprecise, and a few of them are, I believe, incorrect. For example, the second entry definition for 歪(いが）める says "いじめる。ひどい目にあわす。", which connotes an act of bullying but does not fit the context of the example sentence it's citing (『菅原伝授手習鑑』「兄弟子に口過す涎くりめを歪めてやろ」）, whose circumstances implies a more righteous intention in the action like, "to punish" or "to avenge." In fact, that is what the most recent edition of 『大辞林』 Daijirin on my Dictionary app on Mac says next to a similar example sentence. This could be dismissed as an instance of imprecision, but it's weird enough that I noticed it and referenced another dictionary.

Another example is the second definition of "油をとる," which says, "ぎゅうぎゅうの目にあわせる。詰問する。油を絞る。" Maybe this might be a case of generational difference---the 5th edition came out in 1999---but never in my life have I seen the onomatopoeia "ぎゅうぎゅう" used that way. Also, in my opinion, you shouldn't use an onomatopoeia in a definition unless the onomatopoeia's literal descriptiveness is the only way to explain the meaning of the word, which wasn't the case here.

Now, given these cons, for the purpose of my learning-japanese-by-reading-a-dictionary-cover-to-cover project, I am switching over to 新明解国語辞典 Shinmeikai Kokugo Jiten, 7th edition. Although it's a learner's dictionary that covers 77,500 words, which is a third of 5th edition Kōjien's 230,000 entries, I love that the lexicographers making this dictionary aims to write readable, clear, and precise definitions unlike the lexicographers of Kōjien whose goal, as implied in the founder's preface for the first edition, leans toward coverage.