First opened Monday, July 27, 2009
酸素
さんそ
- 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).
oxygen
Oxygen is “sour element” — a calque of Dutch from the same 1834 book as hydrogen.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は酸素不足で死んだ。
He died from lack of oxygen.
鉄や酸素は元素である。
Iron and oxygen are elements.
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 酸 (san, “acid”) + 素 (so, “element”), calque of Dutch zuurstof (literally “sourstuff”). Compare German Sauerstoff, Luxembourgish Sauerstoff, Indonesian zat asam. Coined by Japanese scientist Udagawa Yōan in 1834 in his book 遠西医方名物考補遺 (“酸素”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 酸素 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.