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First opened Saturday, March 29, 2008

金

きん

  • 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).

gold, metal; money

JLPT N3Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)漢語 · Sino-JapaneseBorrowingSound change

Kin went from kimʉ to kiɴ, from Middle Chinese 金 (kim).

Taken apart

No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.

Written with 金

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.

  • “/kimʉ/ → /kiɴ/”
  • “From Middle Chinese 金 (kim). Compare modern Mandarin 金 (jīn), Hokkien 金 (kim).”

Source: Wiktionary: 金 (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).

Other readings of 金 on the same Wiktionary page

These describe other words written the same way, not きん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.

こん

  • “/komʉ/ → /koɴ/”
  • “From Middle Chinese 金 (kim).”

かね

  • “From Old Japanese.”
  • “Possibly derived from unbound prefix kana- fused with い (i, nominal particle).”
  • “The four kanji spellings of this term, 金 (“gold”), 銀 (“silver”), 銅 (“copper”), and 鉄 (“iron”), hint at the importance of each of these four metals in ancient Japan.”

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.
Borrowing
Taken over from another language.
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
  • 金色
  • 五行

Also read きん

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.

  • 金This word

    gold, metal; money

    き↓ん head-high (atamadaka)

  • 菌

    germ, bacterium

    き↓ん 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 March 29

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