First opened Sunday, November 29, 2009
万歳
ばんざい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
banzai, Long live ~!
Banzai is a mixed reading: the second part kept an older Chinese sound while the first took a newer one.
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
女王陛下万歳！
God save the Queen.
彼が金メダルをとったという知らせをきき、私たちは万歳と叫んだ。
We cried banzai at the news that he won the gold medal.
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.
- “Shift in reading from 万(ばん)歳(ぜい) (banzei) below, keeping the older goon reading for the second character and adopting the relatively newer kan'on reading for the first character. Doublet of マンセー (mansē).”
Source: Wiktionary: 万歳 (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 万歳 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ばんざい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ばんぜい
- “From Middle Chinese 萬歲 (MC mjonH sjwejH). The kan'on, so likely a later borrowing.”
まんざい
- “From Middle Chinese 萬歲 (MC mjonH sjwejH). The goon, so likely the initial borrowing.”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.