First opened Tuesday, May 22, 2007
最近
さいきん
- 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).
recently, nowadays, in recent years, most recent, latest
Saikin is 最 (sai-, “most”) plus 近 (kin, “close”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
最近どうだ？
How have you been recently?
最近食欲が無い。
I have a poor appetite these 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.
- “最 (sai-, “most”) + 近 (kin, “close”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 最近 (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.