Happiness, a stiff image, and a paper dictionary

Until they read Miura Shion’s The Great Passage, this reading writes, the writer had not thought deeply about dictionaries. A dictionary was only something one opened to find the meaning of a word one did not know. The first feeling that rose was that “happiness” and “dictionary” did not seem easily joined. A dictionary, they had thought, was a collection that explains an object, and the image was a little stiff. Still more, one now meets dictionaries more often on a computer site or a phone than in paper form, and that quality felt, they write, quite analog — and, against expectation, that analog quality became part of what made them want to keep reading.

The student’s own title for the reading, as given in this reading, is to work quietly, faithfully, and with all one’s passion; the subtitle is the importance of having passion for one’s work. The book, in this account, speaks through the people who make a dictionary of the value of a paper dictionary and of analog care, and of a real passion that goes with long fidelity.

Fresh definitions, and how a dictionary is built

A phrase that defines “right” freshly stayed with them: the side that corresponds to the 0 when one writes 10. They could not help, they write, letting out a sound of wonder. In this book, a secret is “information told one person at a time, in the hope that it will be public the next morning”; a yawn is “an opinion expressed so the inside is clearly visible, or something often done when bored, especially in school mathematics”; and tomorrow is “one of the tools that let one not have to force the work one should do today.”

A dictionary, they write, is a gathering of word meanings, sometimes with tables, in which the corresponding words of one’s own language or of another are arranged in order. Familiar dictionaries often also give pronunciation, uses, history, etymology, pictures, and example sentences. Once people used paper dictionaries more; now they use the internet more. Looking at the dictionary one always uses when learning a language from a more scientific angle, they add, becomes possible here. A dictionary is built of a macrostructure and a microstructure: the microstructure is the horizontal structure that explains the linguistic information about a headword, and the macrostructure, as this reading later makes clear, is the vertical structure in which headwords are arranged. Lexicography is the field that systematically sets out the important linguistic knowledge of a language; lexical semantics studies the meaning of words and idiomatic expressions.

The Daidokai, Majime, and a passion that answers passion

The book, they write, is a novel that takes dictionaries and the words that make them up as its material, and it is a story of people captivated by the nature of language. The name of the dictionary being compiled, the Daidokai, is glossed as a ship that holds the words a person needs and lets them cross the sea. The setting is the dictionary department of the publisher Genbu Shobo, and a single-minded figure with a sharp sense of language appears. Through the hard struggle of people who, in an age of electronic dictionaries and smartphones, still compile a paper dictionary, the book, in this reading, hands on the analog value we have forgotten.

What it wants to say, they judge, is not the dictionary itself, but the real passion, accompanied by long fidelity, shown by the people who compile that ship. The writer had thought that to be passionate looked old-fashioned; they came to feel that passion overflows with life, and is a force that lets person speak to person. One should answer someone’s passion with passion, they close, and today’s passion may yet, without one’s knowing, become a great ship in the future. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student reading of Miura Shion’s The Great Passage: a paper dictionary, and a quieter kind of passion.

Last updated: 15 November 2026