First opened Sunday, October 1, 2006
文化
ぶんか
- 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).
culture
Bunka is Middle Chinese for “the way of educating by using morality, literature, rituals and music”, repurposed in the Meiji period to translate German Kultur.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
文化は言語を破壊する。
Culture destroys language.
彼は西洋文化が好きだ。
He likes Western culture.
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.
- “Learned borrowing from Middle Chinese 文化 (mjun xwæH, “the way of educating by using morality, literature, rituals and music”), repurposed during the Meiji period as a translation of German Kultur.”
- “Cited with the culture sense starting from roughly 1870.”
Source: Wiktionary: 文化 (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.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.