Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857), the English missionary, was born in London. After serving an apprenticeship in the printing trade, he joined the Missionary Society and was sent to Malacca in 1817. There followed almost twenty years of Protestant missionary work in what is now Indonesia. After the Opium War he moved to Shanghai in order to assist in a translation of the New Testament into Chinese, and remained in China until his return to England in 1856.
　　Medhurst's long career in the Far East made him familiar not only with Malay and Chinese, but also with Japanese. Although he never visited Japan, he set about compiling the present work from whatever sources he could find at hand.
　　The quality of the printing, as the author himself explains, leaves much to be desired, there having been no suitable paper available. In addition to this, since the printer was wholly unfamiliar with the Japanese language and script, there are numerous misprints. Against each entry the Japanese word is given in romanized form, in katakana and frequently in Chinese characters also.