First opened Thursday, May 26, 2005
中心
ちゅうしん
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
center, core
Chūshin comes from a Middle Chinese compound meaning literally “heart in the middle”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
市役所は市の中心にある。
The city hall is in the center of the city.
市の中心に駅があります。
There is a station in the center of the city.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “From Middle Chinese compound 中心 (MC trjuwng sim, literally “heart in the middle”). Compare modern Hakka reading chûng-sîm.”
- “From 中 (chū, “center”) + 心 (shin, “core”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 中心 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.