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First opened Saturday, November 24, 2007

空想

くうそう

  • 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).

daydream, fantasy

JLPT N2Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)noun or participle which takes the aux. verb surutransitive verbnouns which may take the genitive case particle 'no'漢語 · Sino-JapaneseCompoundBorrowing

Kūsō is Middle Chinese 空想, literally “fictional, fabricated + think, thought”; the fantasy sense is first cited in Japanese to 1886.

Taken apart

  1. 空

    くう

    fictional, fabricated

  2. 想

    そう

    think, thought

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 空想

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.

Not settled

Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.

  • “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 空想 (khuwng sjang^X, literally “fictional, fabricated + think, thought”).”
  • Hedged“The sense of fantasy is first cited in Japanese to 1886, and probably reflects a Rangaku and Meiji era style of repurposing older terminology to translate unfamiliar Western concepts.”
  • “The Buddhist sense is older, and was borrowed into Japanese along with various Chinese Buddhist texts. This term is included in the 摩訶止観 (Maka Shikan), better known in English by its Chinese pronunciation, the Mohe Zhiguan, completed some time in the early 600s.”

Source: Wiktionary: 空想 (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.

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 November 24

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

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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