First opened Sunday, March 11, 2007
研究
けんきゅう
- 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).
study, research, investigation
Kenkyū's first character 研 originally read gen; for reasons unknown the reading shifted to a kan'yō yomi of ken.
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
彼は研究に夢中だ。
His study absorbs him.
彼女は研究に夢中だ。
She is absorbed in her study.
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 Middle Chinese 研究 (ngen *kiuᴴ?). Compare modern Hakka ngiên-kiu, Eastern Min ngiĕng-géu, Min Nan gián-kiù.”
- Hedged“The original on'yomi for the first character 研 was gen, more closely matching the Chinese origins. For reasons unknown, the reading shifted from gen to a kan'yō yomi of ken.”
Source: Wiktionary: 研究 (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.