Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary

Japanese English dictionary published by Kenkyūsha

First published in 1918, Kenkyusha’s New Japanese English Dictionary (新和英大辞典) has long been the largest and most authoritative Japanese English dictionary. Translators, scholars, and specialists who use the Japanese language affectionately refer to this dictionary as the Green Goddess or GG because of its distinctive dark green cover. The fifth edition, published in 2003, is a volume with almost 3,000 pages; it contains about 480,000 entries (including 130,000 Japanese headwords, 100,000 compound words, and 250,000 example phrases and sentences), nearly all of which are accompanied by English translations. The editors in chief of the fifth edition are Toshiro Watanabe, Edmund R. Skrzypczak, and Paul Snowden. Besides the print edition, the dictionary is also available on CD ROM (EPWING format), online, and in electronic dictionary and iPhone versions. Electronic dictionaries that contain the fifth edition are generally flagship models. They include the Canon Wordtank G70, the Seiko SR E10000 (the first electronic dictionary with GG) and SR G10000, and the Casio "University Student" series (XD D9800 in 2012) and "Professional" series (XD D10000 in 2012). The Sharp PW SB2, PW SB3, PW SB4 and PW SB5 models also contain the full Kenkyusha dictionary. For both Casio and Sharp at least, the dictionary is also available on an SD or micro SD card that can be purchased separately for certain models. There is also a companion English Japanese dictionary, currently in its 6th edition, which contains 260,000 headwords.

In 1918, the publication of the first edition of Kenkyusha’s New Japanese–English Dictionary, Takenobu's Japanese–English Dictionary, named after the editor in chief, Takenobu Yoshitarō, was a landmark event in the field of lexicography in Japan. Completed in under five years with the assistance and support of leading scholars in the field, and published when Kenkyūsha was still a minor academic publishing company, the Takenobu was the most authoritative Japanese–English dictionary of the time, and cemented Kenkyūsha's reputation in the field of academic publishing. In 1931, Kenkyūsha undertook a major revision in the dictionary by expanding upon former entries and adding newer ones. The British diplomat George Sansom, who later became a renowned historian of Japan, was a major contributor and editor of this edition. Aside from the ever evolving nature of the Japanese and English languages, competition from two other major dictionaries released in the 1920s – Takehara's Japanese–English Dictionary and Saitō's Japanese–English Dictionary, both of which were larger than the first edition of Kenkyūsha's – was probably a major driving force behind these revisions (although new editions of these dictionaries were never released, allowing Kenkyūsha's to assert and maintain its dominance among Japanese–English dictionaries). From this second edition onward, the dictionary became known as Kenkyusha’s New Japanese–English Dictionary. During World War II, reputable institutions in the United States and Great Britain, including Harvard University's Department of Far Eastern Languages, produced pirated versions of this dictionary for the war effort. Because of the Pacific War, Kenkyūsha did not revise the dictionary for almost 20 years until 1949, when it decided to incorporate the many new borrowings from English that resulted from the American occupation of Japan. After five years of revision, Kenkyūsha published its third edition in 1954. Beginning with this edition and continuing through the 1974 fourth edition, the editors attempted to make the dictionary into a more scholarly work by citing English language expressions from English texts, particularly from literature; this, however, resulted in clumsy, artificial sounding Japanese and English. The editors abandoned this practice for the fifth edition, which has entries that sound more natural to both native Japanese and native English speakers.

Koh Masuda, editor, Kenkyusha’s New Japanese–English Dictionary, fourth edition (Tokyo: Kenkyūsha, 1974). Watanabe Toshirō (渡邊敏郎), Edmund R. Skrzypczak, and Paul Snowden, editors, Kenkyusha's New Japanese English Dictionary (新和英大辞典), fifth edition (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 2003).