First opened Monday, January 11, 2010
社会
しゃかい
- 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).
society
“Society” began as a gathering to honor the god of the earth, until a writer repurposed it in 1875.
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
暴力は社会のガンだ。
Violence is the cancer of our society.
男は社会を形成する。
The men form a society.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 社會 (MC dzyaeX hwajH, “public gathering for offering to the god of earth”), as a compound composed of 社 (dzyae^X, “god of earth; ceremony for offering to the god of earth”) + 會 (“gathering”). The word was repurposed by Fukuchi Gen'ichirō in 1875 to translate the western concept of society.”
Source: Wiktionary: 社会 (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.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.