First opened Thursday, December 10, 2009
先行
せんこう
- 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).
preceding, going first
“Preceding” is “go before” — and the same spelling has a native reading, sakiyuki, from 1678.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
稲光は雷の音に先行する。
The flash of lightning precedes the sound of thunder.
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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 先行 (MC sen haeng, literally “preceding + to go”).”
- “First cited to a text from 833.”
Source: Wiktionary: 先行 (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 先行 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not せんこう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さきゆき・さきいき
- “Compound of 先 (saki, “point, tip; the front, the forward direction; the future”) + 行き (yuki, “going”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 行く (yuku, “to go”), alternative reading for iku).”
- “The sakiyuki reading is first cited to a text from 1678.”
- “Less commonly encountered with the reading sakiiki, using the standard iki reading for the second half. This variant is first cited to a text from 1686.”
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.