First opened Wednesday, December 20, 2006
魅力
みりょく
- 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).
charm, fascination, appeal
Miryoku is a wasei kango, first attested in 1911 in Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's short story 秘密 (Himitsu, “The Secret”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はある種の魅力があった。
He had a certain charm.
彼の魅力に引きつけられた。
I felt drawn toward him.
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.
- “Wasei kango from elements 魅(み) (mi, “charm, allure, fascination”) + 力(りょく) (-ryoku, “power”).”
- “First attested in 1911 in Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's short story 秘密(ひみつ) (Himitsu, “The Secret”) (see quotation).”
Source: Wiktionary: 魅力 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.