First opened Friday, April 20, 2007
全然
ぜんぜん
- 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).
not at all; wholly, entirely
Zenzen is an orthographic borrowing from Chinese 全然 (quánrán) in the early 1800s, at first with furigana reading it まったく (mattaku).
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
ぜんぜん気にしない。
I don't care a bean.
彼はぜんぜん幸福ではない。
He isn't happy at all.
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.
- “Orthographic borrowing from Chinese 全然 (quánrán) in the early 1800s from 白(はく)話(わ)小(しょう)説(せつ) (hakuwa shōsetsu, literally “vernacular novels”), a genre using more colloquial styles, initially with furigana indicating a reading of まったく (mattaku, “completely”).”
- “First cited to a text from 1823, with the ぜんぜん (zenzen) reading becoming more common starting from the late 1890s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 全然 (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.