Review by Ben Bullock

A big and famous Japanese dictionary with 220,000 words. Has some pictures to illustrate various words. This book does not contain much about etymologies of words. This book has been pretty useful to me over the years but mostly for looking up things which were too obscure to be in the other dictionaries.

Review by David Luke

I have a copy of Koujien, which is very comprehensive, but has (as stated above) a "historical emphasis", meaning that verbs are listed in their classical forms, and definitions of words are listed in order of historical usage (oldest meanings first) rather than being listed in order of frequency. I don't have any first-hand experience with the other two dictionaries mentioned above.

Review by Maiko Covington

I got this for my high school graduation present from my homeroom teacher. Really generous guy. This dictionary is really good for looking up obscure words, or when you need a really detailed definition. I had to write a paper on the coronation ceremonies of the emperor, and I was able to look up ... read more