The Influence of Webster's Dictionaries on the Compilation of English-Japanese Dictionaries in the Meiji Period<BR><BR>


�@�@In the first decade of the Meiji era, Webster's dictionaries were used as a guide to supplementing new technical words or deleting obsolete words.  This is largely because of the insufficient and ill-balanced word list of Picard's English-Dutch dictionary which constituted a basis of the first English-Japanese dictionary (1862).  In 1871, Webster's diacritic system of phonetic representation were first employed in English-Japanese dictionaries.  This provided the impetus for general and successive use of Webster's spelling books and dictionaries in the Meiji period.