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Daijirin
Japanese title大辞林
CategoryKokugo

Review of Daijirin by an anonymous reviewer

I did a lot of kokugo dictionary surfing when I was working on an English-Japanese dictionary project recently, and I would rate the three dictionaries I used as follows:

Daijirin > Daijisen > Koujien

Although Koujien is a fine dictionary, its definitions are often more terse than Daijirin's and its historical emphasis is a drawback when one is using contemporary Japanese. I find the example sentences from premodern texts to be particularly frustrating (mainly because I usually don't understand them!). Daijirin also suffers somewhat in this regard. If you need a kokugo dictionary as a reference for writing or speaking Japanese, then the Daijisen may be a bit better for that purpose.

I was amazed at how often the Daijisen definitions were identical or nearly identical in wording to the Daijirin definitions. If they were American dictionaries, the lawsuits would have started already. And the same Todai professor is listed as the supervising editor for both. In general, though, the definitions seemed to be more complete in Daijirin than in Daijisen.

The first edition of Daijirin, which took two decades to prepare, was planned specifically to compete with Koujien. In my opinion, Daijirin is the winner.


For questions, comments, or if you would like to add your review to the above list, please email Ben Bullock <benkasminbullock@gmail.com> or use the discussion group for this web site.