[Ads-l] tsundoku

[Barretts Mail]

1. Albeit in italics, the The New York Times has an article with “tsundoku” in it.

All Those Books You’ve Bought but Haven’t Read? There’s a Word for That
Kevin Mims
8 October 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/books/review/personal-libraries.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/books/review/personal-libraries.html>

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A better term for what he’s talking about might be tsundoku, a Japanese word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read.
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2. The BBC also covered this word a few months ago. It’s not in italics, which seems odd.

Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them
29 July 2018
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013 <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013>

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Do you have a habit of picking up books that you never quite get around to reading?

If this sounds like you, you might be unwittingly engaging in tsundoku - a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature….

He explained to the BBC the term might be older than you think - it can be found in print as early as 1879, meaning it was likely in use before that.
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3. The earliest citation I see is 1995:
International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia, p. 492
edited by Philip G. Altbach, Edith S. Hoshino
https://bit.ly/2yCg1nf <https://bit.ly/2yCg1nf>

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This practice is popularly referred to in Japanese as _tsundoku_ (to pile up with the intent to read—formally, the dictionary defines the word as bibliophilism).
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4. Other than that, there’s a Bookshelf Porn post dated “5 years ago” with the word:

http://bookshelfporn.com/post/50693846048/tsundoku-the-japanese-word-for-buying-books <http://bookshelfporn.com/post/50693846048/tsundoku-the-japanese-word-for-buying-books>

There is a Wikipedia article on the term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku>). Neither Wiktionary, the English OLD nor Merriam-Webster have “tsundoku". Presumably the “t” is silent in English.

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org