Excavation of rare kanji is exhausting. ––Search for "DEAD WORDS"––

　The kanji used in translation are basically "COMMONLY USED KANJI" determined by the government.

　As you can see if you look at novels and newspapers from several decades ago or before the World War Ⅱ, the kanji that they used to use in the past generally had more strokes than we do now. This is called the "OLD FONT" and is not often used in translation.

　China is the home of kanji, naturally has more kanji than Japan, there are many things that are not normally used in Japan. Furthermore, there are many so-called "DEAD WORDS" that are no longer used even in China, the Chinese translations make too hard.

　What do you do when searching for kanji that doesn't come up even after converting to kanji?

　I often use searches such as Google, this is a method to search by entering the "RADICAL" or "LEFT-HAND RADICAL" and the kanji associated with it.

　For example, if you want to search for "菘", enter "GRASS RADICAL" plus "松".

　If you still can't find it, it accesses some site for "HANDWRITTEN CHINESE SIMPLIFIED INPUT" etc. using the mouse write kanji by hand, the computer recognizes it and detects the corresponding kanji.

　Sometime the "DEAD WORD" are not recognized by computers.

　Previously, a Chinese manuscript contained a kanji called "緫", that is not commonly used in Japanese even Chinese. I tried various search methods.

　If you type "THREAD" plus "葱" into Google, it will come up, but if you write by hand using handwritten Chinese simplified input, it will be difficult to detect.

　Also, if you copy the Chinese text of the manuscript and paste it into Google search, perhaps because the Chinese language is not commonly used, the computer may not be able to recognize the copied "緫", resulting in garbled characters.

　The next thing I tried was searching for Chinese poems that used the word "緫" that was written in the Chinese manuscript.

　"緫" is a kanji that appears in the poem "籍田賦" written by Pan Yue, he was a litterateur of 3rd century AD. When I searched for this poem, I found the Japanese word "緫".

　In this way, it is quite difficult to find dead words that are not only in Japanese but also in modern Chinese.