Omoinohokaさん, in your latest post, you mentioned using etymology sites. I was wondering if you would have the time to share them, or maybe your favorite one? In any case, thank you for always creating such interesting posts!! I hope you're having a nice, peaceful evening. Take good care of yourself! :)
namidagawaさん、thanks for your lovely ask! 💗
I use a ton of different resources to make the Word of the Day posts. Here’s the ones that I use the most.
First, I go to good old Google and type in the word and 語源 gogen (etymology). I also do the same thing with the word and 由来 yurai (source). Then I comb through all the different results and find the most credible ones.
1. 語源由来辞典 gogen-allguide.com
This site doesn’t have all words, but it is my first go-to. Here’s where I learned about 村八分 murahachibu (ostracism). It gives you the definition and then the etymology and is very highly reputed.
This site explains how each kanji means, how it came to be, and the etymology behind its very first iteration. Here’s what it had to say about 蔓, one of the recent words of the day.
I know that the English Yahoo Questions are kinda famous for being meme and joke fodder, but the Japanese take Yahoo Questions very seriously. While I don’t like relying on it for answers, sometimes I find that Japanese people have asked the same questions about words I’m looking up. If the best answer includes sources, I will use it as an explanation.
4. 成り立ちで知る漢字のおもしろ世界: 人体編 The World Becomes More Interesting by Knowing Kanji Etymology: Human Radical Collection
This is a book I found very recently online. It has a lot of explanations about kanji and their etymology. This is where I found 脆い’s etymology the other day.
It’s not very common for there to be an entire page about a word, but sometimes there are! When I was looking up the etymology of 嘆く nageku (to wail, lament) I read up about 旱魃 Kanbatsu (drought or the God of Drought) on Wiki.
6. 苗字由来net https://myoji-yurai.net/
Sometimes I do collections of unusual Japanese surnames, and this is where I get all of that information from. It’s a super cool site! I use this to look up people’s names when I can’t read them or I want to know more about them as well.
It gives you their name, how common it is in Japan, about how many people have it, how it’s read, and, sometimes, the etymology of the surname.
Where would any learner of Japanese be without jisho? God praise the people that made that site. This is where I get each word and kanji’s on-yomi, kun-yomi, and meaning in English. I also use their example sentences if they have them.
8. 用例.jp http://yourei.jp/ and ふりがな文庫 https://furigana.info/
Sometimes the words I have are so low-frequency that jisho doesn’t have an example sentence, so I turn to other examples on Japanese sites like yourei.jp or furiganabunko, which both have examples of words pulled from various published works like books and newspapers. Some of the examples they use are very old, like from before WWII, and are hard to understand, so I have to hunt for ones that I think will be easier to understand for everyone.
Other than that, sometimes I happen to come across entire articles about “Did you know the true meaning of x kanji?!” that are super helpful haha.
Now you guys know all of my secrets and can look up the etymologies all on your own! XD
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