I want to know how Japanese dictionaries are organized, as Japanese doesn't use the roman alphabet "a,b,c,d..."
Do they instead organize words by あ、い、う、え、お? Or do they do it but kanji radical? Or something else?
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Sign up to join this communityI want to know how Japanese dictionaries are organized, as Japanese doesn't use the roman alphabet "a,b,c,d..."
Do they instead organize words by あ、い、う、え、お? Or do they do it but kanji radical? Or something else?
The system is called 五十音 (gojuuon). There’s a decent description of it on Wikipedia. A web search on “Japanese alphabetical order” will help, also.
In the Japanese language, the gojūon (五十音, Japanese pronunciation: [ɡo(d)ʑɯꜜːoɴ], lit. "fifty sounds") is a traditional system ordering kana by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order. The "fifty" (gojū) in its name refers to the 5×10 grid in which the characters are displayed. Each kana, which may be a hiragana or katakana character, corresponds to one sound in Japanese. As depicted at the right using hiragana characters, the sequence begins with あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o), then continues with か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko), and so on and so forth for a total of ten rows of five columns.
[...]
The gojūon order is the prevalent system for collating Japanese in Japan. For example, dictionaries are ordered using this method. Other systems used are the iroha ordering, and, for kanji, the radical ordering.