First opened Wednesday, January 6, 2010
電気
でんき
- 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).
electricity, (electric) light
Electricity was borrowed from Chinese in the 1850s; “electric light” is a 1901 contraction.
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
電気を消すな。
Don't turn off the light.
電線は電気を流す。
Wires carry electricity.
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.
- “Borrowed from Chinese 電氣 /电气 (“electricity”), attested since the 1850s.”
- “The electric light sense arose from a contraction of 電気灯 (denkitō), itself from this same 電気 (denki, “electricity; electric”) + 灯 (tō, “lighting”). This sense is first attested in 1901.”
Source: Wiktionary: 電気 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.