First opened Monday, February 22, 2010
台風
たいふう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
typhoon
Typhoon is a borrowing that was later dressed in Chinese-looking kanji.
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
台風は去った。
The typhoon is gone.
台風で川が氾濫した。
The typhoon caused the river to flood.
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.
- “First attested in Japanese in 1900 in the katakana form タイフーン (taifūn), itself a borrowing from English typhoon.”
- “Prior to the Meiji era (1868–1912), this kind of severe storm was called a 野分き (nowaki), literally a "field-splitter" for the way the winds would wreak havoc on farms. The term タイフーン (taifūn) then appears in 1900, also attested with spelling 大風 and reading of taifun. Then in 1907 meteorologist Okada Takematsu (岡田武松) scientifically defined what qualifies as this specific type of storm, and then purportedly as phono-semantic matching of the English typhoon, adopted the kyūjitai kanji spelling 颱風 (read as taifū without that final "n") on the basis of Chinese references using the term 颱風 /台风 (táifēng). This spelling then became common from the Taisho era (1912–1926).”
- Hedged“There was likely some influence from Chinese on the form of the Japanese word. In Walter Henry Medhurst's English and Chinese Dictionary of 1847-48, he glossed the English word typhoon as Chinese 太風 /太风 and 颶風 /飓风 (jùfēng), the former of which would be read in Japanese as taifū.”
- Hedged“The origins of English typhoon are somewhat uncertain, with possible ancient connections to Chinese. See that entry for more.”
- “台 is a daiyōji replacing 颱.”
Source: Wiktionary: 台風 (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.