Your recommendations must be written for [Anglophones]( https://english.stackexchange.com/q/106200). Please DON’T recommend anything aimed at fluent Japanophone or Sinophones. Disregard anything fully written in Chinese and/or Japanese. DON’T repeat any of the following.
#### 1. [*Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters*. By Hikaru Morimoto, research collaborator. Lawrence J. Howell.](http://nihongo.monash.edu/Etymological_Dictionary_of_Han_Chinese_Characters.pdf)
On January 13, 2012, [Victor Mair](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3699) mooted this. [Brad Warren digitized this.](https://bradwarden.com/kanji/etymology)
#### 2. [*The Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese Characters*](https://www.hackingchinese.com/review-the-outlier-linguistics-dictionary-of-chinese-characters-with-discount-code/) by Ash Henson, John Renfroe.
No, I didn’t list these by mistake! I see they are titled *Chinese*. I know Modern Chinese uses way more than the 2,136 [jōyō kanji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji)! But unaware of any other Kanji etymology dictionaries for Anglophones, I have no other recourse than Chinese etymology dictionaries!
#### 3. [*The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji: Remembering and Understanding the 2,136 Standard Characters*](https://redd.it/74uxsk) (2016 2nd edition) by Christopher Seeley, Kenneth G. Henshall, with Jiageng Fan.
## https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/100142
1 comment
You do realise kanji are Chinese characters, right? You’re acting like using a Chinese etymological dictionary is somehow a grave sin, but if you were to take the term 漢字 and translate it literally, you would get ‘characters of the Han’, or in other words, ‘Chinese characters’. A Chinese etymological dictionary is not a big problem here; if you trace the etymology of the majority of kanji, that’s what you’re going to end up with *anyway*. It is impossible to fully trace the etymology of kanji without going back to Chinese.
I’m also not sure what your obsession is with specifying ‘Anglophone’ (*capitalised*, no less), to the point of providing a link to a stack overflow debate on it. English speaker works fine here; there’s no magical force that prevents a non-native English speaker from ever being able to read material intended for ‘anglophones’ (and indeed, it would be strange to try and limit it as such), so I’m not sure what that’s about.
And now for the bad news I have to break to you; English-language content on the etymology of kanji (or, rather, on Japanese linguistics as a whole) is sparse. There’s very little interest in Japanese linguistics outside of Japan proper, and it’s hard enough just to learn the language to begin with, that very few make the effort to get that detailed.
Plus, Japanese linguistics have some conventions that translate poorly. Like how Japanese linguists use 単語 and 語彙, both translating as ‘vocabulary’, despite being mutually exclusive. Those books look to be enough for a layman; You’re not going to get very much with your ‘Anglophone content only’ policy, considering how much of the deeper Japanese linguistics stuff will inevitably be behind the language barrier. If anything, from an anglophonic perspective, using Chinese etymological dictionaries will probably net you a lot more info on etymology.