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 d ...

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

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 Kammu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means in Japanese. It is a ...

scholar Minamoto no Shitagō (源順, 911–983 CE) began compilation in 934, at the request of Emperor Daigo's daughter. The title is abbreviated as , and is also spelled 倭名類聚抄 (with '' wa'' 倭 "dwarf; Japan" for ''wa'' 和 "harmony; 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 (: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar me ...

. 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 fi ...

system was developed in

Chinese dictionaries There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have d ...

like the '' Erya'', '' Xiao Erya'', and '' Shiming''. The ''Wamyōshō'' categorizes ''

kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...

'' vocabulary, primarily

nouns In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.Example n ...

, 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 either; '' homographs''—words that mean different things, but have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation), or '' homophones''—words that mean different things, but have the same pronunciat ...

or ''

fanqie ''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè, l=reverse cut) 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 ...

'' 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 t ...

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

Shuowen Jiezi The ''Shuowen Jiezi'' is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen , during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the ''Erya'' (), the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' contains the ...

'') 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 , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

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 930s in Japan Heian-period books

References

Further reading

External links