First opened Saturday, November 3, 2007
原理
げんり
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
principle, theory, fundamental truth
Genri is 原 (gen, “principle”) plus 理 (ri, “theory”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼はひとつの原理を考えだした。
He figured out a principle.
多数決原理が民主主義の根本原則だ。
Majority rule is a basic principle of democracy.
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“From 原 (gen, “principle”) + 理 (ri, “theory”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 原理 (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.