First opened Thursday, November 9, 2006
行列
ぎょうれつ
- 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).
line, procession; matrix (math)
Gyōretsu is attested from 749 as a line or procession; the date of its mathematical sense, “matrix”, is uncertain.
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
彼は行列を見ようと首を伸ばした。
He craned his neck to see the procession.
市長は行列の先頭に立って歩いた。
The mayor walked at the head of the procession.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, in turn from Middle Chinese 行列 (MC haeng ljet). First attested in Japanese in 749.”
- Hedged“The date of the mathematical sense is uncertain. Matrices for calculation were long known in Chinese mathematics, and were used to solve systems of linear equations in the work 九章算術 /九章算术 (“The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art”), compiled from the 10th through the 2nd centuries BCE. The component terms 行 and 列 (liè) are both used in that text, but not in the particular combination of 行列 (hángliè) (see also Wikisource). The first Japanese work on this aspect of mathematics was a 1683 text by 関孝和 (Seki Takakazu), but it is not yet clear if this text includes the term 行列 (gyōretsu) with the sense of matrix.”
Source: Wiktionary: 行列 (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.