Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary

[citation needed] Translators, scholars, and specialists who use the Japanese language affectionately refer to this dictionary as the Green Goddess or GG because of its distinctive dark-green cover.

[1] The fifth edition, published in 2003, is a volume with almost 3,000 pages; it contains about 480,000 entries (including 130,000 Japanese headwords, 100,000 compound words, and 250,000 example phrases and sentences), nearly all of which are accompanied by English translations.

The British diplomat George Sansom, who later became a renowned historian of Japan, was a major contributor and editor of this edition.

[4] Because of the Pacific War, Kenkyūsha did not revise the dictionary for almost 20 years until 1949, when it decided to incorporate the many new borrowings from English that resulted from the American occupation of Japan.

This change reflects the fact that most users of the dictionary are native speakers of Japanese, who are more comfortable with the kana-based lookup system.