Tenrei Banshō Meigi

The Tenrei banshō meigi or Tenrei banshō myōgi (篆隷萬象名義, "The myriad things [of the universe], pronounced, defined, in seal script and clerical script") is the oldest extant Japanese dictionary of Chinese characters.

One of the National Treasures of Japan held at the Kōzan-ji temple is an 1114 copy of the Tenrei banshō meigi.

The Chinese Yupian dictionary defines 12,158 characters under a system of 542 radicals (bùshǒu 部首), which slightly modified the original 540 in the Shuowen jiezi.

The American Japanologist Don Bailey writes: At the time of its compilation, calligraphic style and the Chinese readings and meanings of the characters were probably about all that was demanded of a dictionary, so that the Tenrei banshō meigi suited the scholarly needs of the times.

Ikeda Shoju has studied the conversion of JIS encoding to Unicode in order to create an online Tenrei banshō meigi.