First opened Friday, November 27, 2009
元気
げんき
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
health(y), energetic
“Healthy” began as the fundamental force of the cosmos, until it was confused with a word for recovery.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
元気出して。
Cheer up!
元気ないね。
You seem to be a little under the weather.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese compound 元氣 (MC ngjwon khj+jH, literally “first, fundamental, source + vapor, spirit, energy”). In Chinese cosmology, this represented the fundamental force that permeates all matter and life. Early Japanese borrowed this word and meaning. Later, this spelling was conflated with the meaning of homophone 減気 (genki, “recovery from illness”), adding in the modern senses related to healthy and wellness.”
Source: Wiktionary: 元気 (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).
Other readings of 元気 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not げんき. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もとき
- “Compound of 元(もと) (moto, “origin, beginning”) + 気(き) (ki, “sense; mood; energy; spirit”).”
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.