First opened Monday, October 17, 2005
理想
りそう
- 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).
ideal
Risō may be a Japanese coinage from 理 (ri, “reason, principle”) plus 想 (sō, “thought, thinking”), first cited in an 1877 translation of Mill's Utilitarianism.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は私の理想の人よ。
He is my Mr Right.
彼女は僕の理想の人です。
She is my dream girl.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“May be a coinage in Japanese from Chinese-based roots as a compound of 理(り) (ri, “reason, principle”) + 想(そう) (sō, “thought, thinking”).”
- “First cited in Japanese to the 1877 translation of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, 利学 (Rigaku) by 西周 (“Nishi Amane”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 理想 (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.