First opened Tuesday, August 28, 2007
疑問
ぎもん
- 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).
question, problem, doubt
Gimon is Middle Chinese 疑問, literally “doubt, suspicion + ask”, first attested in the early 1600s.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
疑問の余地はない。
There is no room for doubt.
疑問が氷解しました！
My doubts have been cleared up.
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.
- Hedged“Ultimately from Middle Chinese 疑問 (MC ngi mjunH, literally “doubt, suspicion + ask”), apparently borrowed later as a learned borrowing from Literary Chinese of the same source term.”
- “First attested in the early 1600s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 疑問 (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.