Japanese dictionary
Horizontal text came into Japanese in the Meiji era, when the Japanese began to print Western language dictionaries. Initially they printed the dictionaries in a mixture of horizontal Western and vertical Japanese text, which meant readers had to rotate the book ninety degrees to read the Western text. Because this was unwieldy, the idea of "yokogaki" came to be accepted. One of the first publications to partially use "yokogaki" was a German to Japanese dictionary (, "Shūchinsōzu Dokuwa Jisho", "pocket illustrated German to Japanese dictionary") published in 1885 (Meiji 18).