First opened Monday, September 21, 2009
器械
きかい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
instrument
An instrument began as a “weapon” in 718 — and its look-alike 機械 became the common spelling from around 1874.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, in turn from Middle Chinese 器械 (MC khijH heajH, “apparatus; weapon”, literally “utensil; tool + weapon; implement”).”
- “First appears in Japanese in a text from 718 CE with the 器械 spelling and a sense of weapon.”
- Hedged“Later appears in a text from 1520 as 機械 (kikai) with a sense of apparatus, device, machine, mechanism, replacing 器 (ki, “utensil; tool”) with 機 (ki, “weaving loom; apparatus”) and reflecting changes in usage and meaning. This spelling may be a Japanese innovation, and it only becomes prominent from around 1874. Prior to that, this term was more commonly written with the original 器械 spelling.”
- Hedged“In modern Japanese, some definitions distinguish the 機械 and 器械 spellings with 機械 used for those machines that include their own motive power, and 器械 for those that have no power of their own. General usage appears to be broader, differentiating the two spellings by the size of the item, with 器械 used for a smaller apparatus or device, and 機械 used for a larger apparatus or equipment. These broad distinctions generally also hold true for the suffixes 器 (-ki) and 機 (-ki).”
Source: Wiktionary: 器械 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.