This paper deals with Japanese deverbal nouns and their status in bilingual Japanese dictionaries, and tries to establish a link between linguistic research and applied lexicography. The research question is how deverbal nouns should be treated in bilingual dictionaries. This study reviews linguistic research done on Japanese deverbal nouns in the past decades and tries to make use of them in compiling dictionaries for language learners. In this study, we investigated four Japanese bilingual dictionaries to examine how they treat deverbal nouns and to reveal problems concerning this matter. Based on these observations and linguistic evidence, the present study suggests that deverbal nouns should not be eliminated from bilingual dictionaries and decisions on the way of presenting them in dictionaries should be based on factors such as corpus-based frequency data.