First opened Wednesday, April 2, 2008
新幹線
しんかんせん
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.
Shinkansen, "Bullet Train"
Shinkansen is 新 (“new”) plus 幹線 (“main line”).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
新しい新幹線の速いこと！
How fast the new Shinkansen goes!
次の新幹線は９時ちょうどに出ます。
The next Shinkansen train leaves at just nine o'clock.
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.
- “新 (“new”) + 幹線 (“main line”)”
Source: Wiktionary: 新幹線 (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.