First opened Friday, January 8, 2010
温泉
おんせん
- 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).
spa, hot spring
A hot spring is “warm spring” in Chinese — and the old /wonsen/ lost its w.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
この温泉は穴場だね。
This hot spring is a great find.
僕は偶然温泉を見つけた。
I hit on a spa.
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.
- “*/wonsen/ → /onsen/”
- “From Middle Chinese 溫泉 (MC 'won dzjwen, literally “warm + spring”). Compare modern Chinese 溫泉 /温泉 (wēnquán).”
Source: Wiktionary: 温泉 (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.