CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Dictionary Hardware

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671

Variant Ideograph Dictionaries

When working with ideographs, there is always the issue of simplied or variant charac-

ters to wrestle with. Some dictionaries, such as  (hànzì xiěf guīfàn

zìdin), illustrate the traditional forms of simplied hanzi. Still other dictionaries, such

as 漢字簡繁體字對照字典 (hànzì jinfántzì duìzhào zìdin) and 

 (jinhuàzì fántzì yìtzì biànxī shucè), are specialized in the sense that they

serve only to provide information on the relationship between traditional, simplied, and

variant hanzi.

For Japanese, Jack Halpern’s New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (NTC, 1993;

Kenkyusha, 1990) is a virtual gold mine of kanji variant information and cross-references.

 (kanji itai jiten; Nichigai Associates, 1994) is a specialized kanji variant

dictionary. Also of interest is  (goji zokuji seiji ichiranhyō; Teihan,

1995), which lists kanji variants that were registered for use in Japanese names. In my

experience, however, the most useful Japanese dictionary that contains kanji variants is

entitled  (kadokawa daijigen; Kadokawa, 1991). is dictionary catalogs a

large number of kanji variants.

A CD-ROM–based product called  (konjaku moji kyō) provides over 150,000

ideographs and their variants. It runs on Windows.

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e relationships among traditional, simplied, and varian