First opened Tuesday, December 15, 2009
重力
じゅうりょく
- 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).
gravity
Gravity borrowed an old Chinese word for “heavy strength” and repurposed it to translate a Dutch one.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
月の重力は地球の６分の１である。
The gravity of the moon is one-sixth of that of the earth.
重力が物を地球の中心に引っ張っている。
Gravity pulls things toward the center of the earth.
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.
- “Initially from Middle Chinese 重力 (MC drjowngX lik, literally “considerable; heavy + force, power”).”
- “The gravity sense was a repurposing of the older term (the considerable strength sense) as a calque of Dutch zwaartekracht to translate Dutch works as part of Rangaku studies.”
Source: Wiktionary: 重力 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.