First opened Thursday, November 5, 2009
風船
ふうせん
- 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).
balloon
A balloon is a “wind ship”, and the word seems to have been coined in Japan around 1860.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼女は風船に穴を空けた。
She pricked the balloon.
風船が空に上がっていった。
The balloon went up in the sky.
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“Appears to be a coinage in Japanese from Middle Chinese-derived roots, as a compound of 風 (fū, “wind”) + 船 (sen, “ship, boat, vessel”).”
- “First cited to a text from 1860.”
Source: Wiktionary: 風船 (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.