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When you think about how dictionaries are compiled, there has been a big, big change in recent years. Large dictionaries that are supposed to cover most or all of the words that are used with any degree of commonality in language, traditionally were compiled by the dictionary editors reading through large numbers of books and magazines and newspapers and just collecting the words. So that they would read through an old novel and whenever they found a word that they didn't know or they found an example of a word being used in a new way or in an interesting way, they would copy down that example of it and put it on a card and they would compile these, you know, huge catalogs of citations -- lists of words being used in context -- and based on those thousands and thousands of citations, they would prepare the entries for the dictionary.

Well there has been a big change in the last twenty years or so, is that of course now the printed word, the written word is available not only in paper form but in electronic form. There are billions of pages on the Internet of English being used by various people in various ways and it is now possible, using search engines or other software to search through all that vast amount of text, very very quickly. And so this has changed, radically, the way dictionaries are compiled. Especially when we are talking about new words, technical words, words that a typical editor does not know from his own experience.

So for example, now my main ongoing dictionary project is I work on the online edition of Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English dictionary. This is called the Kenkyusha Online Dictionary or KOD. And every month we add 300, 400, 500 new words to that dictionary. These are Japanese words that have not been listed in our dictionary yet. Some of them are words that just were missed or were considered too obscure ten years ago when the previous edition of the dictionary was compiled. But many of them are new words, new names of organizations, new names of plants and animals that have been recently identified, new kinds of health food, new words for fashion, different kinds of cloth that are used in women's clothing, cosmetics, sports -- baseball terms is something that we often add to the dictionary.

But now, some of the editors working on the dictionary do go about their job in the traditional way of reading newspapers, reading magazines, finding words that we don't have in our dictionary and then putting them on a card, but many of us almost use no paper at all. We pick up the words from online sources, from digital sources, or if we see it in a printed magazine, we don't even bother writing it down, we just go to the Internet. We do a search on Google or another search engine to see how the word is used. And so if we find a new word, and we can do a search on it and see that it appears in newspaper articles, that bloggers have been using the word, that it has hundreds or even thousands of hits -- thousands of examples of it being used -- then we go right ahead and add it to our dictionary.

And then of course because it is a Japanese-English dictionary, we have to create an English translation or English explanation of the meaning. Again the Internet is absolutely essential for that. For example, if there was, . . . I can't remember the exact word, but there was a Japanese word referring to a particular kind of cloth used in women's skirts and I am not an expert on women's fashion at all, but by doing a search at Google for this word, I was able to find pictures of this kind of cloth. And so then I went to English websites that also showed women's skirts and fabric, and I was able to find pictures of exactly the same kind of cloth. And so then I was able to come up with an English word for that original Japanese word. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, this would have required an entire library of specialized dictionaries and photograph books and maybe making phone calls to people who are experts in the field. But I was able to solve the problem in just ten or fifteen minutes. And we added that entry to our dictionary.

And so that is one way in which technology has changed the way dictionaries are created, but of course it's also changing the way dictionaries are used. I teach now at the University of Tokyo and I teach classes in English writing. And this semester at least, I don't think I have seen a single student in any of my classes with a paper dictionary. Most of the students do bring dictionaries to school, but they are these compact electronic dictionaries. They are rather expensive. The good ones cost 30,000, 40,000 even 50,000 yen. They are so small and light and they contain so much information that it is just ideal, I think, for college students who have busy lives where they are moving from place to place all the time.

So that is one way in which the form of dictionaries has changed. But what is interesting about most of those electronic dictionaries though is that the dictionaries that they contain, if it is an English-English dictionary, Japanese-Japanese dictionary are still based on the paper dictionaries. So most of the dictionaries sold in Japan do include the famous Japanese-Japanese dictionary Kojien, but the content is nearly identical to the paper edition.

When you produce a paper dictionary, there is this restriction that you have. For example, if you add one word or one line on a page, then you have to remove another line, usually on the same page, you cannot just keep adding and adding and adding, because there is an absolute limit on the number of pages in the dictionary and the number of lines on the page. That restriction should not apply to electronic dictionaries, because memory, computer memory is cheap now, and so it should be possible to keep adding and adding and adding. And when you want to write more lines, just add more lines instead of using abbreviations to spell out the words completely. But interestingly the producers of electronics dictionaries for the most part, just copy the data from the paper dictionaries including the various restrictions on it. So I hope that in the future as the years go by, more of these portable electronic dictionaries will expand their content with specific definitions and explanations that are not restricted by the former limitations of paper dictionaries.

One type of dictionary that has gone beyond those limitations is the online dictionary. There are a number of online dictionaries available now. In Japan the publishers Sanseido and Kenkyusha both have online dictionaries. As I mentioned before, the Kenkyusha dictionary is expanded on a monthly basis. We don't have to worry about how many pages we are going to use. Also we have much more freedom in the lengths of our entries, we can use more words than necessary, we can avoid abbreviations so that the entries are easier to read if we want to.

Those are both commercial dictionaries, the Kenkyusha and Sanseido dictionaries, the users have to pay some money for them. But there are also a number of free online dictionaries available. Probably many people listening to this are familiar with the free online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It's available in English and in Japanese and many other languages. It is really an amazing project. The quality is somewhat limited, it's not quite as good as a commercial encyclopedia, because anybody can edit the entries. And so there are mistakes and there is vandalism occasionally, some of the writing is not as good as it should be, but the quantity is just amazing, that it covers so many fields and it is updated so quickly, that Wikipedia has become a very valuable resource for encyclopedic information.

But Wikipedia has a companion site called Wiktionary in which the volunteers are creating their own English dictionary and dictionaries of other languages. And so that is a very interesting project and I wish them the best of luck, but to tell you the truth, my impression of the Wiktionary project is that it is not as good as Wikipedia, as the encyclopedia project. I think the reason why is it's not hard for a non-specialist to write an encyclopedia article about a topic of their interest. So if you are interested in the history of a particular town or the life of a writer, you can read some books on it and if you are a reasonably educated person, or a reasonably good writer, you can write a good encyclopedia entry about it. But creating dictionary entries is somewhat more specialized. And the tools are not something that an ordinary person learns in college. And so to tell you the truth, I have looked at Wiktionary and I have sometimes tried referring to it, but at least at this point it is not quite good enough for everyday use when compared with commercial dictionaries produced by professional lexicographers and linguists.

It is a little bit hard to know exactly with the future of dictionaries will be. Probably twenty years ago, thirty years ago, nobody could have predicted today's online dictionaries or even the portable electronic dictionaries. Certainly they could not have predicted how much information could be packed into a small electronic device or that online dictionaries could be available all over the world instantaneously for free, for anybody who has access to the Internet. And so now, I really would hesitate to predict what dictionaries will be like twenty, thirty, forty years from now.

Some people I imagine would think that, "well dictionaries won't be necessary because we will have machine translation tools. That you will just be able to input the Japanese and out will come perfect English. And so people won't even need to use dictionaries to learn language anymore. I am skeptical about that though. People have been working on machine translation for decades now and there are many very sophisticated machine translation programs available. And to tell you the truth, they are useless. They produce translations that usually cannot be understood and if there are understood, usually the meaning is different.

So I think dictionaries will continue to be necessary and they will continue to be necessary for the same reason. Human beings, students, translators, people working in government, in private companies and business of all kinds, will continue to need to use monolingual and bilingual dictionaries when writing in their own language, when writing in foreign languages, when reading foreign languages in order to help them understand what words mean and how words are used.

So the form of the dictionaries might be different again. Who knows? We might be able to just plug our brains directly into the dictionary in order to search for the words and then the meanings will pop up in front of our eyes, visible only to us but not to anyone else. But the content of dictionaries, I mean what words are listed and how those words are defined, how these words are shown in example sentences, I don't think that is going to change. So I think that if I am still alive thirty, forty years from now, I expect to still be working on dictionaries.