John Fairbairn's Go Names Dictionary, or Onomasticon, was first published in hard copy form in December 1999 after 30 years work in compiling it. It is currently out of print and will stay that way, because the GoGoD CD now contains a bigger and better version.

The names section alone has over 2500 entries. Potted biographies are provided in English for all entries, usually brief (birth/death dates, origins, affiliations, promotions, teachers, family relationships, variant spellings) but often much longer. Both modern and historical players are extensively covered, male and female. There are over 1300 Japanese players, over 400 Chinese and over 150 Korean. Other entries cover about go patrons, reporters or other personalities, and there are about 600 cross references (nicknames, etc).

Specially for the CD an electronic look-up program has been added to enable you to read the names of Japanese, Chinese and Korean players. Even people unfamiliar with characters can now look up names quickly and easily. Most characters can be found with just two mouse clicks, in old characters, modern simplified characters, kana and hangul.

The diagrams show the Japanese kanji and kana pages. In the first case a search on the single character in the top left has come up with a long list of people (Japanese, Korean and Chinese) who have that character somewhere in their name. The list is in the top white box. Clicking on any entry there brings up the full entry in the lower box.

You can, of course, search in English, too.

In the next case the user has searched on the Japanese letter NE for go terms rather than names. Where necessary, the entries are accompanied by diagrams, as here.

Names Dictionary is part of GoGoD95. Go back there?

Or see the Korean page of the Dictionary