First opened Thursday, August 28, 2008
軍
ぐん
- 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).
army, force, troops
軍, “army”, shifted from /kʲun/ to /ɡun/ after it came from Middle Chinese.
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 軍
In a sentence
彼は軍に徴兵された。
He was drafted into the army.
ドイツ軍は敗走した。
The Germans took to flight.
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.
- “/kʲun/ → /ɡun/”
- “From Middle Chinese 軍 (MC kjun).”
Source: Wiktionary: 軍 (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 軍 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ぐん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いくさ
- “From Old Japanese, first attested in the Nihon Shoki (720 CE).”
- “The iku part is possibly derived from either 射くう (ikuu, “to shoot (an arrow)”, obsolete), 的 (ikuha, “target”, archaic), or classical verb 生く (iku, “to exist, live; bring to life”). The iku- in the first and second etyma appear to be cognate.”
- “The final sa is likely from 矢 (sa, “arrow”, obsolete) or さ (-sa, suffix attached to verbs to refer to the time that the activity is done, or to nouns indicating direction).”
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.