First opened Sunday, May 23, 2010
外国人
がいこくじん
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
foreigner
Gaikokujin is, by surface analysis, 外国 (gaikoku, “foreign country”) plus 人 (-jin, “person”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼の奥さんは外国人らしい。
His wife seems to be foreign.
大部分の客は外国人だった。
The greater part of the guests were foreigners.
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.
- “/ɡwaikokuzin/ → /ɡaikokudʑin/”
- “By surface analysis, 外国(がいこく) (gaikoku, “foreign country”) + 人(じん) (-jin, “person”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 外国人 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.