First opened Wednesday, December 23, 2009
膨大
ぼうだい
- 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).
enormous, extensive
“Enormous” is “swell” plus “big”, and the word is first attested in 1872.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
叔父は膨大な財産を所持している。
My uncle is possessed of great wealth.
辞書を編さんするには膨大な時間を要する。
Compiling a dictionary demands an enormous amount of time.
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“First attested in 1872. Likely a coinage in Japan of Middle Chinese-derived components, as a compound of 膨 (bō, “swell, distend”) + 大 (dai, “big”). The second sense of huge is likely a replacement spelling for Chinese-derived homophone 厖大 (bōdai), first cited to 1898.”
Source: Wiktionary: 膨大 (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.