First opened Wednesday, January 13, 2010
哲学
てつがく
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
philosophy
Nishi Amane coined “philosophy” in 1874 — after first trying a spelling that copies the Greek.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
私の兄は哲学の権威だ。
My brother's an authority on philosophy.
私は哲学の研究に専念する。
I give myself to the study of philosophy.
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“By surface analysis, 哲(てつ) (tetsu, “clear, wise, sage”) + 学(がく) (-gaku, “study”). Coined by Nishi Amane in his 1874 百一新論 as a translation of English philosophy or Dutch filosofie. Nishi's kanji spelling 希哲學 (hirosohi) is literally calqued from Ancient Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophía, “pursuit of wisdom”, literally “love of knowledge”), apparently from the Chinese morphemes 希 (xī, “to long for”) and 哲 (zhé, “wisdom”), before he later settled with 哲學 (modernly spelt 哲学).”
- “Nishi also used the transcriptions ヒロソヒ, ヒロソヒー (hirosohī) and 斐鹵蘇比.”
Source: Wiktionary: 哲学 (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.