First opened Tuesday, March 6, 2007
宗教
しゅうきょう
- 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).
religion
Shūkyō is 宗 (shū, “doctrine”) plus 教 (kyō, “teaching”), repurposed near the start of the Meiji period to translate English religion.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
宗教は信じない。
I don't believe in religion.
当時その宗教は全盛だった。
The religion was in its glory in those days.
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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese, from the two nouns 宗 (shū, “doctrine”) + 教 (kyō, “teaching”). First attested with this straightforward meaning in a compilation of Classical Chinese-style poetry from 1403.”
- “Repurposed near the start of the Meiji period to translate English religion, which sense is first attested in 1866.”
Source: Wiktionary: 宗教 (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.