First opened Tuesday, October 23, 2007
機関車
きかんしゃ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
locomotive, engine
Kikansha is 機関 (kikan) plus 車 (sha).
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
機関車は長い貨物車の列を引っ張って走っていた。
The locomotive was pulling a long line of freight cars.
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.
- “From 機関(きかん) (kikan) + 車(しゃ) (sha).”
Source: Wiktionary: 機関車 (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.