First opened Monday, March 8, 2010
地震
じしん
- 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).
earthquake
One spelling, two unrelated words: a Chinese compound and a lost native one.
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
地震がその地域を襲った。
The earthquake shook the area.
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.
- “/di t͡ɕin/ → /d͡ʑiɕiɴ/”
- “From Old Japanese, in turn from Middle Chinese compound 地震 (MC dijH tsyinH). First cited to a text from 734.”
Source: Wiktionary: 地震 (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).
Other readings of 地震 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not じしん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ない
- “/nawi/ → */nawʲi/ → /naji/ → /nai/”
- “From Old Japanese. First cited to 720 in the Nihon Shoki.”
- “Apparently this term semantically first referred to the ground, and was used most in constructions like ないふる (naifuru, “the ground shakes”). Over time, this shifted via metonymy to refer to the shaking itself.”
- “May be a compound of 土(な) (na, “ground”, possibly an apophonic form of ni, "earth, soil") + 居(ゐ) (i, “being”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of 居(ゐ)る (iru, “to be”, in a location; in modern Japanese, used of animate objects)).”
- “The kanji spelling is jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
なえ
- “/nawi/ → */nawʲi/ → /naji/ → /naje/ → /nae/”
- “Appears in the Nippo Jisho.”
- “Shift from nai, historical nawi (see above). First cited to the late 1400s.”
- “The kanji spelling is jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
じぶるい
- “Compound of 地 (ji, “ground”) + 震い (furui, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of classical Japanese verb 震ふ (furufu, “to tremble; to roar”), related to modern 震える (furueru)). The furui changes to burui as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.