NipponDailyNipponDaily
All words

First opened Saturday, September 22, 2007

高校

こうこう

  • 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).

high school; senior high school

JLPT N4Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)漢語 · Sino-JapaneseCompoundSound change

Kōkō contracts 高等学校 (kōtō-gakkō, “high school”).

Taken apart

  1. 高

    こう

    high

  2. 校

    こう

    school

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.

Written with 高校

In a sentence

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.

  • “Contraction of 高(こう)等(とう)学(がっ)校(こう) (kōtō-gakkō, “high school”).”

Source: Wiktionary: 高校 (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.
Sound change
The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.

Related in the dictionary

The words JMdict points to from this word's sense. A word that has opened links to its day; the others are named as JMdict writes them.

See also

Also read こうこう

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 高校This word

    high school; senior high school

    こうこう flat (heiban)

  • 孝行

    filial piety

    こ↓うこう head-high (atamadaka)

More like this

Other words so far that share a part, a process or a layer with this one, closest first. Each tag says what is shared; nothing here is a claim beyond what the entries already show.

Also opened on September 22

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

© 2025 - 2026 NipponDaily. Released under the Apache-2.0 License.

Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it