First opened Wednesday, November 10, 2010
医学
いがく
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
medical science
Igaku is first attested in Japanese in the late 1400s, in the Bunmei Hon Setsuyō-shū dictionary.
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
彼は医学の学生だ。
He is a medical student.
彼は医学に専念した。
He was devoted to medical science.
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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 醫學 (MC 'i haewk). First attested in Japanese in the late 1400s in the 文明本節用集 (Bunmei Hon Setsuyō-shū, “Bunmei Edition Dictionary”), published some time during the Bunmei era (8 June 1469 through 9 August 1487).”
- “By surface analysis, 医(い) (i) + 学(がく) (-gaku).”
Source: Wiktionary: 医学 (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.