Dai Kan-Wa Jiten - First Edition

First Edition

The original (1955–1960) Dai Kan-Wa Jiten has 13 volumes totaling 13,757 pages, and includes 49,964 head entries for characters, with over 370,000 words and phrases. This unabridged dictionary, often called the "Morohashi" in English, focuses upon Classical Chinese and Literary Chinese vocabulary. It provides encyclopedic information about poetry, book titles, historical figures, place names, Buddhist terms, and even modern expressions. The Dai Kan-Wa Jiten is intended for reading Chinese and does not cover Japanese words created since the Meiji era.

This is the format for main character entries:

• Pronunciations, in Sino-Japanese borrowings, Middle Chinese with every fanqie spelling and rime dictionary category listed in the Jiyun, and Modern Standard Chinese in the semi-phonetic Zhuyin (or Bopomofo) system and in Wade-Giles romanization. Volume 1 contains Hanrei (凡例?, "Introductory Remarks") and a comprehensive chart comparing the Zhuyin, Wade-Giles, and Pinyin systems for every phoneme used in modern Chinese.
• 10,000 Seal script characters, plus other variant written forms.
• Meanings, diachronically arranged by earliest citations. Usage examples are given from numerous classical texts and Chinese dictionaries.
• Character etymologies are occasionally included. These are not instances of word etymology as the term is understood in comparative linguistics, but character analysis, as originated by the Shuowen Jiezi.
• 2,300 Illustrations are included where useful, often copied from sources like the 1609 Sancai Tuhui.

One archaism of the first edition is giving Japanese pronunciations of characters in historical kana usage rather than modern, retaining for instance now-obsolete ゐ wi and ゑ we.

Each individual volume has a radical-and-stroke sorting index arranged by Chinese radical or signific (following the 214 Kangxi radicals), and subdivided by the total number of remaining strokes in the character. For Dai Kan-Wa Jiten users unfamiliar with this traditional system of dictionary collation, the final index volume is an essential tool.

Volume 13 contains four indices to the dictionary, which cite volume and page numbers for each character.

• The Sōkaku sakuin (総画索引?, "Total Stroke Count Index") divides characters by overall stroke count (1-64), subdivided by radicals.
• The Jion sakuin (字音索引?, "Sino-Japanese Reading Index") arranges characters by their borrowed Chinese pronunciations (on'yomi), then by stroke count.
• The Jikun sakuin (字訓索引?, "Japanese Reading Index") arranges characters by their native Japanese pronunciations (kun'yomi), and further by stroke count.
• The Shikaku gōma sakuin (四角號碼索引?, "Four corner method Index") organizes characters using a complex Chinese system of four-digit numbers (0000-9999), plus an optional extra number, then subdivided by the number of strokes.

Volume 13 also contains a Hoi (補遺?, "Appendix") listing 1,062 Chinese characters that the dictionary uses in definitions but does not include as main entries, plus the official 1,850 Japanese tōyō kanji for general use, and 517 simplified Chinese characters.