First opened Friday, September 18, 2009
幼稚園
ようちえん
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.
kindergarten
Kindergarten was, apparently, translated word for word from German — Japan's first ones opened in 1876.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
しげみちゃんを幼稚園に迎えに行けないの。
I will not be able to pick up Shigemi at the kindergarten.
それにしても、幼稚園というところは、季節の行事にとても敏感です。
Even so, kindergartens are sensitive to seasonal events.
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“Compound of 幼稚 (yōchi, “infantile”) + 園 (en, “garden”). The term is apparently a calque of German Kindergarten (“children's garden”), as Japanese yōchien were started in 1876 based on the German model initiated by Friedrich Fröbel in 1837 and on the term Kindergarten that he coined in 1840.”
- “First cited in Japanese to 1876.”
Source: Wiktionary: 幼稚園 (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.