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It looks like I'm not going to get anywhere on this, and I'll let it go.  But as a final point of clarification, I don't especially care about the xref.  My issue is that I *really* don't think "reference" or "referral" are appropriate glosses here.  They aren't generically useful outside of a few idiomatic expressions, and I find them particularly misleading.

I don't think they are close enough to justify an xref. None of the JE entries for 照会 suggest 問い合わせ as a synonym.

I just read up on every edit I've made since November. I appreciate all of the work in checking updates, and the discussions were all interesting to catch up on.

As a prelude to this comment, I've proposed an entry for 身元照会, which I would argue is idiomatic("reference check").  Even putting "reference" in this entry doesn't fix that entry.

Anyway, of everything since November, this one entry I still disagree on.  A question was asked: "why is there an xref to 問い合わせ, they aren't the same..." The sankoku defn. of 照会 is:
1. [名・他さ]問い合わせ（ること）。「手紙でーする」

That's it.

Granting that sankoku is not the be-all-end-all of the Japanese language, you don't get much more "exactly the same" than that.  It just seems like we're reading something "special" into this term that isn't really there, perhaps because of some GG5 glosses.

身元の照会/身元照会 is not a good counterexample.  It is a completely idiomatic expression. "inquiry into one's work history/past" = "reference check".  身元照会先 "person to whom one inquires to gain information about an applicant's background history" = (job) reference.  1-word translation.  The lumine example given:

ルミナス: 詳しい情報については支配人に照会するように言われた I was referred to the manager for detailed information.
is literally "I was told to ask the manager".

照会する is not "refer" here.  "照会するように言われる" is "to be referred".  You need the whole thing. "To be told to ask someone else" = "refer".　

On top of that, there is a homonym 紹介, which *literally* means "introduction" or "referral" in the sense that we usually expect(referral from a doctor).  This even leads to mistakes in Japanese (some of which I pointed out in my treatise).  

The presence of "reference" is doubly-misleading because of the adjacent entry "照会先" "job reference", which really makes this term look like something it isn't.

And then we have the related-kanji term 参照, which literally means "reference" as in "research material".  Same kanji, same gloss, that makes these terms look potentially synonymous, and they aren't at all.

Having "reference" and "referral" here muddies the waters for very little gain.  This is a statement from experience, as I'm still untangling this vocabulary in my head.  

Almost any argument you could make for including "reference" or "referral" here could be made for adding them to 問い合わせ.  For example, here's the lumine example:
問い合わせるように	2563	92.9%
照会するように	196	7.1%

https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/問い合わせる
詳しいことについては秘書に問い合わせるように言われた.
I was referred to the secretary for detailed information.

Would it not be silly to add "reference" to 問い合わせ for that?  This is precisely why I put the xref in, as a means of saying "hey, these really are almost exactly the same".

I agree wrt the xref.

Not identical in meaning to 問い合わせ - not seeing the point of the xref.

While they are less common, I think reference and referral should be included.

This whole novel is just to remove a term that I think causes more confusion than good.  If this already agrees with your intuition, feel free to not read any of the rest.

Up front, we have an entry already for 照会先 ("reference (e.g. for a job)") and 身元照会先, so those are handled.

sankoku's entire definition is 問い合わせ(ること）, which is slightly shorter than the daijs gloss. Seems like as a noun, this is 問い合わせ, and as a verb it is 問いあわせる。We don't have "refer" or "reference" on either of those.

This appears to only become "reference" in a very narrow sense, in things like 照会先. "inquiry-person" = "(job) reference".  I don't believe 照会 is used as [abbr] for 照会先 alone. 

〇〇に照会してください is *sometimes* glossed as "please refer to... (e.g. your local bank branch)", which is an elegant transformation.  But "please inquire at" also works, and you could make the exact same argument for glossing 問い合わせ as "referral" or "reference".
に問い合わせください	61833
に照会してください	1455

With regards to "referring" in the medical senses, it appears to me that there is occasional confusion between 照会 and 紹介, but that 紹介 is the correct term for referring a patient to another doctor. (a few random 照会 entries with overlapping English glosses seem to have added some confusion to eijiro). 

Like 照会先, credit lookup & reporting agencies sometimes get this in their name. "Credit reference agency" is a gloss I encountered for 信用照会機関.  Again, this is niche case(and we generally prefer "credit reporting agency" anyway )

照会させる = lit.  "made to inquire", could sometimes be glossed as "X was referred to ...".  Putting things in the causative form can do neat things to glosses, and we don't generally deal with this.

Meikyo vt and vi additions to n,vs entries
-*- via bulkupd.py -*-