The
Daikanwajiten --
Great Kanji-
Japanese Dictionary -- has no
comparison
* and
is fully justified in its name, being probably
the most
comprehensive and
authoritative reference work on the subject
of
Chinese characters (Jp.
kanji), not merely those used in
Japan,
but all ever invented. Carefully listing 49,964 characters,
all with definitions, variants and usage examples, the full set
has 14 volumes which retail for
Y12,000 a pop, summing up to
a cool Y168,000 (about $1500). And note that this is not a
"normal" dictionary, it's a
character dictionary where the subject
of individual entry is a single
character: for comparison, imagine an "
alphabet dictionary"
which would have eg. 170 pages on the letter
Q, ways of writing it,
what words it is found in, etc and you'll get some idea. For
more details, including the answer to "How on earth do you use something
like that?", check out
Using a Kanji Dictionary.
As the main editor of the Daikanwajiten is a Mr. Tetsuji Morohashi,
the character index numbers used in the dictionary are often referred
to as Morohashi numbers, and many other dictionaries include these
numbers in case the reader wants the full scoop on a character.
As archaic, obsolete and just plain obscure characters are often
omitted from "mainstream" character sets like JIS and Unicode,
if your hobbies happen to include
translating 1500-year-old Zen poetry
the Morohashi number is often the only way to refer to a character
which fell out of use during the Tang Dynasty. Then again,
now that Unicode 3.0 includes 27,786 characters, you have to get pretty
far out there to run into problems...
* Well, actually both Hanyu Da Cidian (54,678
characters) and Zhonghua Zihai (a ludicrous 85,568) have
bigger numbers, but
whether this has been reflected in quality as well is debatable.
Golden oldies like Kangxi Cidian (47,035 characters,
published 1716) and Shouwen Jiezi (9,353 characters, written
c. 100 AD) fall far short, but are of course indispensable
for etymology.