First opened Thursday, November 24, 2005
悪魔
あくま
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
devil, demon, evil spirit
Akuma is Middle Chinese 惡魔, literally “bad, evil + demon”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
魔女集会で悪魔を召喚する。
Her coven conjures the demons.
彼は人間の姿をした悪魔だ。
He is a devil in human shape.
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 惡魔 (MC 'ak ma, literally “bad, evil + demon”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 悪魔 (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.