First opened Monday, February 8, 2010
電話
でんわ
- 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).
a telephone
A Japanese-made word, built from Chinese parts, to name the telephone.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
電話しよう。
Let's make a phone call.
電話が切れた。
The telephone was still.
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.
- “Wasei kango, created as a translation of English telephone. Coined in Japanese as a compound of Chinese-derived 電 (den, “electric”) + 話 (wa, “talking”). See also 話す (hanasu, “to talk, to chat”).”
- “First attested in a text from 1891.”
Source: Wiktionary: 電話 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.