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I had a (little) hard time finding the word 宣材{せんざい}. It was neither in the Midori dictionary nor Chrome's rikaikun extension. I had to google it.

I found an explanation here on kotobank but not much more. My question is, is it a relatively new word? Or simply it is not considered a "real word" but just a shortened form of 宣伝材料? Although in the second case I would still expect it to pop up in a dictionary such as Midori (maybe with a reference to 宣伝材料).

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  • 宣伝材料 means propaganda material. I checked here and here, both seems agree that "宣材" is an abbreviated form of "宣伝材料". – Tetsuya Yamamoto Jul 13 '18 at 2:18
  • @TetsuyaYamamoto thanks. But why the downvote? It seems a perfectly reasonable question to me. – Tommy Jul 13 '18 at 2:20
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It's a common abbreviation in the marketing or showbiz field, but it's still jargon, and simply not common enough to be listed in generic dictionaries. You should be able to find this in a テレビ業界用語集, etc. It's also listed in this Wikipedia article along with many other words not in ordinary dictionaries. The meaning is easy to guess, anyway.

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  • Thanks. Yes I understand that, maybe I should rephrase my question. What I was mostly interested is "how to understand if a word is jargon/shortened form of something"? For example, I guess also 就活 is an abbreviation of　就職活動 and yet I can easily find it in most dictionaries. So what is that makes a shortened word eligible to go into a dictionary and what doesn't? .. I guess you were editing the question while I was commenting. – Tommy Jul 13 '18 at 2:50
  • @Tommy It's almost impossible to tell how common a 熟語 is just by looking at its appearance. The editors decide whether a word is worth listing according to their policy; a short-lived buzzword tends to be ignored, and so on. – naruto Jul 13 '18 at 2:58
  • Understood, that's what I would guess too after all. Thank you. – Tommy Jul 13 '18 at 3:03

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