First opened Saturday, December 5, 2009
時間
じかん
- 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).
time
The Chinese “time interval” was repurposed in 1881 to translate the philosophers' “time”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
起きる時間よ。
Time to get up.
出発する時間だ。
It is really time for us to go.
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“Probably originally borrowed from Middle Chinese compound 時間 (dzyi kɛn, literally “time interval”). Repurposed in the early Meiji period as a translation of the western term time in relation to philosophy in the 1881 publication of 哲学字彙 (Tetsugaku Jii, “Philosophy Dictionary”) compiled by Inoue Tetsujirō. The meaning "hour" can be analyzed as a compound of 時(じ) (ji, “o'clock”) + 間(かん) (-kan, time interval suffix). Compare other terms formed with the suffix 間(かん) (-kan) like 三(さん)分(ぷん)間(かん) (sanpunkan) and 三日(みっか)間(かん) (mikkakan).”
- “The reading is a mix of the goon reading ji and the kan'on reading kan, suggesting either that the reading changed after borrowing (from the expected goon pronunciation of jiken or the expected kan'on pronunciation of shikan), or that this term was independently coined in Japanese after the constituent terms 時(じ) (ji) and 間(かん) (kan) were borrowed.”
Source: Wiktionary: 時間 (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 時間 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not じかん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ちかん
- “Pronunciation shift to a devoiced initial consonant in certain dialects.”
- “/d͡ʑikaɴ/ → /t͡ɕikaɴ/”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.