First opened Saturday, October 17, 2009
自由
じゆう
- 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).
freedom
“Freedom” is an old Chinese word that Fukuzawa Yukichi repurposed in the 1860s.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
思想は自由だ。
Thought is free.
俺は自由な男。
I'm a free man.
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.
- “/d͡ʑiːu/ → /d͡ʑijuː/”
- Hedged“Apparently first imported from Middle Chinese 自由 (MC dzijH yuw) with an original meaning of roughly “arising from oneself”. Repurposed in the 1860s by Fukuzawa Yukichi as a translation of English freedom or liberty, as an extension of the original meaning: “freedom to act according to one's own thoughts, without restriction”. However, Li (2014) proposes that since the Han dynasty 自由 already meant “to be free”, from earlier “to follow oneself.””
Source: Wiktionary: 自由 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.