First opened Wednesday, November 28, 2007
真空
しんくう
- 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).
vacuum
Shinkū is first attested in the Kaifūsō anthology of 751, and its modern sense of vacuum in 1876.
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
自然は真空を嫌う。
Nature abhors a vacuum.
その実験には真空が必要だ。
For that experiment they need a complete vacuum.
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 Old Japanese, in turn from Middle Chinese 真空 (MC tsyin khuwng).”
- “First attested in the 懐風藻 (Kaifūsō) anthology of Sinitic poetry written by Japanese authors, compiled in 751.”
- “The modern sense of vacuum is first attested in 1876.”
Source: Wiktionary: 真空 (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.