Composition
The first edition of 1972-76 included some 450,000 entries in 20 volumes, while the second edition reduced the number of volumes to 13 (by making each volume much bigger) and added 50,000 entries. The Second edition is the largest Japanese dictionary published with roughly 500,000 entries and supposedly 1,000,000 example sentences. It was composed under the collaboration of 3000 specialists, not merely Japanese language and literature scholars but also specialists of History, Buddhist studies, the Chinese Classics, and the social and physical sciences, over the course of 40 years.
Entries are listed by kana, in the gojūon (五十音) order (the native alphabetical order of the Japanese syllabary). They provide the most common kanji used to write the word, the part of the speech, the various definitions, some early examples of the use of the word, and notes on the pronunciation. The first edition required the use of a slim supplementary pamphlet to track down the date and author of the historical works cited, but the dates have now been incorporated into the actual entries in the second edition, a major convenience. A supplementary volume includes an index of kanji, dialect words, and greater detail of the historical citations.
Read more about this topic: Nihon Kokugo Daijiten
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)