Kadokawa Kogo Daijiten (The Great Dictionary of Archaic Japanese)

This is the digital version of the epoch-making Kadokawa Kogo Daijiten (The Great Dictionary of Archaic Japanese) (in five volumes). It was published after more than 20 years of painstaking and meticulous editorial work, and thus represents the summit of ancient Japanese dictionaries, opening the way for truly precise comprehension of classical Japanese literature.

The largest of its kind among all existing ancient Japanese dictionaries, Kadokawa Kogo Daijiten contains a rich collection of approximately 100,000 headwords, covering historical classical and colloquial terms. The dictionary incorporates the latest research achievements at the time of publication, in particular for the middle ages and early modern age, for which a large number of words including legal terms, economic terms, popular terms and jargon have been selected. Formerly considered to be outside the scope of ancient Japanese dictionaries, this dictionary also endeavors to cover proper nouns, such as personal and place names, with encyclopedic commentaries as well as examples of usage and sources.

Having passed through editorial committees consisting of authorities in the field, this is at present the utmost that one could wish for from a dictionary of ancient Japanese in terms of content on the origins and history of Japanese, detailed commentaries on the evolution of words and pertinent examples of usage.

In the JapanKnowledge version, while it is, of course, possible to conduct searches in the historical kana used to display the dictionary headwords as well as in the pronunciations equivalent to these spellings (modern kana readings), search convenience has also been enhanced by the addition, for example, of search keys for contracted sounds, double consonants and voiced or unvoiced consonants. In addition to headword search and whole-text search, it is possible to conduct searches from various viewpoints, such as limiting the scope of the search only to historical kana usages or designating example sentences or source information in advanced searches. Furthermore, use of the four facet functions available for advanced searches, makes it possible to narrow down search results for instantaneous extraction of the desired entries.