The is a 938 CE

Japanese dictionary have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic ...

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

. The

Heian period The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kanmu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means "peace" in Japan ...

scholar Minamoto no Shitagō (源順, 911–983 CE) began compilation in 934, at the request of

Emperor Daigo was the 60th emperor of Japan,Imperial Household Agency (''Kunaichō'') 醍醐天皇 (60)/ref> according to the traditional order of succession. Daigo's reign spanned the years from 897 through 930. He is named after his place of burial. G ...

's daughter. This ''Wamyō ruijushō'' title is abbreviated as ''Wamyōshō'', and has graphic variants of 和名類聚抄 with ''wa'' 和 "harmony; Japan" for '' wa'' 倭 "dwarf; Japan" and 倭名類聚鈔 with ''shō'' 鈔 "copy; summarize" for ''shō'' 抄 "copy; annotate". The ''Wamyō ruijushō'' is the oldest extant Japanese dictionary organized into semantic headings, analogous to a Western language

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym dictionar ...

. This ancient lexicographical

collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office filin ...

system was developed in

Chinese dictionaries Chinese dictionaries date back over two millennia to the Han dynasty, which is a significantly longer lexicographical history than any other language. There are hundreds of dictionaries for the Chinese language, and this article discusses some o ...

like the ''

Erya The ''Erya'' or ''Erh-ya'' is the first surviving Chinese dictionary. Bernhard Karlgren ( 1931:49) concluded that "the major part of its glosses must reasonably date from the 3rd century BC." Title Chinese scholars interpret the first title cha ...

'', '' Xiao Erya'', and ''

Shiming The ''Shiming'' (), also known as the ''Yìyǎ'' (逸雅; ''I-ya''; ''Lost Erya''), is a Chinese dictionary that employed phonological glosses, and "is believed to date from ''c''. 200 E. This dictionary is linguistically invaluable because it ...

''. The ''Wamyōshō'' categorizes ''

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

'' vocabulary, primarily

nouns A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

, into main headings (''bu'' 部) divided into subheadings (''rui'' 類). For instance, the ''tenchi'' (天地 "heaven and earth") heading includes eight semantic divisions like ''seishuku'' (星宿 "stars and constellations"), ''un'u'' (雲雨 "clouds and rain"), and ''fūsetsu'' (風雪 "wind and snow"). Each dictionary entry gives the Chinese character, sources cited, Chinese pronunciations (with either a

homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones ( equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definitio ...

or ''

fanqie ''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one ...

'' spelling), definitions, and corresponding Japanese readings (in the ancient ''

Man'yōgana is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of thi ...

'' system using kanji to represent Japanese pronunciation). It cites over 290 sources, both Chinese (for example, the ''

Shuowen Jiezi ''Shuowen Jiezi'' () is an ancient Chinese dictionary from the Han dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary (the ''Erya'' predates it), it was the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give t ...

'') and Japanese (the ''

Man'yōshū The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in ...

''). The ''Wamyō ruijushō'', survives in both a 10-volume edition (十巻本) and a 20-volume edition (二十巻本). The larger one was published in 1617 with a commentary by Nawa Dōen (那波道円, 1595–1648) and was used in the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was character ...

until the 1883 publication of the 10-volume edition annotated by Kariya Ekisai (狩谷棭齋, 1775–1835), also known as the ''Senchū Wamyō ruijushō'' (箋注倭名類聚抄 "Annotated commentary to the ''Wamyō ruijushō''"). The 10-volume edition has 24 main headings divided into a total of 128 subheadings, while the 20-volume version has 32 and 249, respectively. The table below illustrates how words are semantically categorized in the 10-volume edition. The broadly inclusive ''Wamyō ruijushō'' dictionary was an antecedent for Japanese encyclopedias. In the present day, it provides linguists and historians with an invaluable record of the Japanese language over a thousand years ago, more specifically the linguistics of the 10th century and Heian Period.

References

External links

倭名類聚鈔
, Waseda University Library online ''Wamyō ruijushō'' (in Japanese) *Manuscript scans at Waseda University Library
161716671667168817th century17th century
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wamyo Ruijusho 1617 books 1883 books 10th-century Japanese books Japanese dictionaries Japanese encyclopedias Late Old Japanese texts 938 10th century in Japan Heian-period books

References

Further reading

External links