Daijisen


The Daijisen is a general-purpose Japanese dictionary published by Shogakukan in 1995 and 1998. It was designed as an "all-in-one" dictionary for native speakers of Japanese, especially high school and university students.

History

Shogakukan intended for the Daijisen to directly compete with Iwanami's popular Kōjien desktop dictionary, which was a bestseller through three editions. The Daijisen followed upon the success of two other Kōjien competitors, Sanseido's Daijirin and Kōdansha's color-illustrated Nihongo Daijiten. All of these dictionaries weigh around one kilogram and have about 3000 pages.
The 1st edition Daijisen included over 220,000 entries and 6000 all-color illustrations and photographs. The chief editor Akira Matsumura was also chief editor of the directly competing Daijirin dictionary. Other Daijisen editors included Akihiko Ikegami, Hiroshi Kaneda, and Kazuo Sugizaki. Shogakukan also released a CD-ROM version of the 1st edition.
The "enlarged and revised" edition Daijisen was more of a revision than an enlargement, with 2978 pages versus 2938 in the 1st edition. Both editions claim "over 220,000 headwords".

Characteristics

The Daijisen and Daijirin have much more in common than Matsumura's lexicographical supervision and similar titles. These two dictionaries share many features of design and content. Both arrange word meanings with the most frequent ones first, in contrast to the Kōjien tradition of arranging with the oldest recorded meanings first. Compare their two respective definitions of hyōsetsu.
Some similarities between these dictionaries are obvious: Matsumura's 2nd edition Daijirin added some full-color illustrations, including a chart of 168 color names and his Daijisen included a color chart of 358.
The Daijisen is not wholly derivative of the Daijirin and has some notable differences. Daijisen improvements include visually appealing designs, more contemporary usage examples, and some helpful layout features. For instance, special columns indicate usage notes for topics including synonyms, suffixes, and even uncommon kanji pronunciations.

Publications

Print editions

Daijisen contents have been used in other dictionary sites, including:
The database versions are marked for April, August, December of every year, with updates delivered in approximately every 4 months.

Electronic versions

The Japanese lexicographer Tom Gally analyzes the Daijisen,
This dictionary seems in many ways a clone of Daijirin. Not only is the same Tokyo University professor listed as editor – though it is important to note that the names appearing on the covers of Japanese dictionaries often have little relation to the people who actually did the work; one case in point being Koujien, even the most recent editions of which list as editor one 新村出 Shinmura Izuru, who has been dead since 1967 – but the definitions in Daijisen follow closely those of Daijirin as well. It also follows Daijirin's practice of putting the contemporary meanings first in its definitions. The two chief differences I've noticed are that Daijisen has color pictures while Daijirin uses line drawings – a rather obvious difference – and that the example sentences and phrases in Daijisen are more often typical of the contemporary language rather than citations from classical literature. This latter point makes Daijisen my first choice when I am writing Japanese and I want to check how words are used in context.

The bibliographer and cataloguer Yasuko Makino describes the Daijisen,
Over 220,000 words including archaic words, technical terms, geographical and personal names, and other proper names as well although focus is on modern words, are in this easy-to-use dictionary. Numerous examples of usage, explanation of delicate difference in the usage of each words, abundant inclusion of synonyms, and 6,000 all-color illustrations are a few of its strengths. One of the unique features of this dictionary is a listing of last elements, which functions as reverse-order dictionary. Includes detailed color charts. This works as kokugo jiten , kanwa jiten , kogo jiten , katakanago jiten , and encyclopedia.

This depiction echoes Shogakukan's blurb that the Daijisen is an "all-in-one, multi-functional dictionary".

Marketing

A Daijisen commercial was listed as an ACC finalist in 2014 54th ACC CM Festival under the interactive division.

Citations

Online dictionaries