Celebrated as the “great treasure trove of kanji culture,” the Dai Kanwa Jiten is a Chinese-Japanese character dictionary containing 50,000 kanji entries and 530,000 compounds, having scoured the existing literature and dictionaries, both ancient and modern. The vocabulary of every historical period is covered, including pre-Qin classics such as the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) and Lunyu (Analects of Confucius) ;chronicles such as the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (Book of Han); the Wen Xuan (Selections of Refined Literature); Tang and Son-dynasty poetry and prose, and novels from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The scope of consulted literature extends to Buddhist scripture; medicine and pharmacognosy ; law; topography, and even Chinese poetry written in Japan.

This is one of the great representative dictionaries of Japan, which has long been widely utilized not only in universities and other research institutions, but also in temples and shrines for the assigning of posthumous Buddhist names and composing ritual prayers, and as a highly influential reference for identifying kanji during the formulation of Japanese character codes.

In the JapanKnowledge edition, not only can kanji characters be searched by direct input, but also by radical, stroke count, or reading, and even with just a part of the character, if you do not know the reading or radical.