First opened Sunday, March 15, 2009
テンポ
テンポ
- 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).
tempo
テンポ comes from Italian “tempo”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
その試合はテンポが遅くおまけに退屈だった。
The game was slow, and it was also boring.
リズムは軽快でテンポは速く、その曲は若者に好まれている。
The rhythm is light, and the tempo fast - that song is liked by young people.
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.
- “Borrowed from Italian tempo.”
Source: Wiktionary: テンポ (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.