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First opened Tuesday, April 18, 2006

創造

そうぞう

  • 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).

creation

JLPT N3Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)noun or participle which takes the aux. verb surutransitive verb漢語 · Sino-JapaneseCompoundBorrowingSound change

Sōzō is Middle Chinese 創造, literally “to begin + to make”.

Taken apart

  1. 創

    そう

    to begin

  2. 造

    ぞう

    to make

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 創造

In a sentence

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.

  • “/sauzau/ → /sɔːzɔː/ → /soːzoː/”
  • “From Middle Chinese compound 創造 /创造 (t͡ʃʰɨɐŋᴴ d͡zɑu^X, literally “to begin + to make”). Compare modern Mandarin reading chuàngzào, Cantonese cong³ zou⁶.”

Source: Wiktionary: 創造 (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.
Sound change
The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.

Also read そうぞう

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 創造This word

    creation

    そうぞう flat (heiban)

  • 想像

    imagination, guess

    そうぞう flat (heiban)

More like this

Other words so far that share a part, a process or a layer with this one, closest first. Each tag says what is shared; nothing here is a claim beyond what the entries already show.

Also opened on April 18

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

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Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it