First opened Monday, November 1, 2010
一生懸命
いっしょうけんめい
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.
very hard (as in "to work hard"), with utmost effort
Isshōkenmei comes from 一所懸命 (isshokenmei), which referred to samurai risking their life to defend inherited territory.
Taken apart
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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
一生懸命働いた。
He worked hard.
一生懸命走った。
I ran as fast as I could.
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.
- “Yojijukugo (四(よ)字(じ)熟(じゅく)語(ご)), from 一所懸命(いっしょけんめい) (isshokenmei), which referred to samurais risking their life to defend the territory inherited from ancestors.”
Source: Wiktionary: 一生懸命 (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).