First opened Monday, May 21, 2007
熱帯
ねったい
- 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).
tropics
Nettai is from Literary Chinese 熱帶 (rèdài, literally “heat, high temperature + belt, zone, area”), coined by missionaries in China.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
あの島は熱帯性気候です。
That island has a tropical climate.
この種の植物は熱帯地方にのみ育ちます。
This kind of plant grows only in the tropical regions.
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 Literary Chinese 熱帶／热带 (rèdài, literally “heat, high temperature + belt, zone, area”), which was coined by missionaries in China.”
Source: Wiktionary: 熱帯 (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.