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First opened Tuesday, August 25, 2009

体操

たいそう

  • flat (heiban)

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).

gymnastics, physical exercises, calisthenics

JLPT N2Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)noun or participle which takes the aux. verb suruintransitive verb漢語 · Sino-JapaneseCompoundMade in JapanBorrowing

Gymnastics got its name in the early Meiji school reforms, when physical education joined the curriculum.

Taken apart

  1. 体

    たい

    body

  2. 操

    そう

    control, manipulate

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 体操

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.

Not settled

Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.

  • Hedged“Apparently coined in Japanese from Middle Chinese-derived elements, as a compound of 体 (tai, “body”) + 操 (sō, “control, manipulate”). First cited in education-related materials from the early Meiji Period in the early 1870s, as part of educational reforms that included the addition of physical education to school curricula.”

Source: Wiktionary: 体操 (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.
Borrowing
Taken over from another language.

Also read たいそう

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.

  • 体操This word

    gymnastics, physical exercises, calisthenics

    たいそう flat (heiban)

  • 大層

    very much, greatly

    た↓いそう 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 August 25

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