First opened Wednesday, January 5, 2011
漫画
まんが
- 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).
comic (book), cartoon
Manga was manɡwa, coined in Japan from Middle Chinese-derived 漫 (man, “as one pleases”) plus 画 (ga, “picture”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
そのマンガの本が大変面白いことがわかった。
I found the comic book very interesting.
テレビやマンガのせいで学生は本を読みません。
Students don't read many books because of TV and comics.
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.
- “/manɡwa/ → /manɡa/”
- “Coined in Japan of Middle Chinese‐derived elements, as a compound of 漫(まん) (man, “as one pleases”) + 画(が) (ga, “picture”).”
- “The sense of a drawing first appears in 1798 in the foreword to Santō Kyōden's picture book 四(し)時(じの)交(ゆき)加(かい) (Shiji no Yukikai), already using the modern shinjitai spelling of 漫画.”
- “The archaic sense of “Eurasian spoonbill” is attested even earlier in the 1778 medical text 薬(やく)品(ひん)手(て)引(びき)草(ぐさ) (Yakuhin Tebikigusa).”
- “In the late nineteenth century, the term was repurposed as a translation for the English word caricature. This shift was led by artists such as Imaizumi Ippyō and Kitazawa Rakuten to elevate satirical drawings (formerly known as ポンチ絵(え) (ponchi-e)) into a professional art form. It later expanded to encompass sequential “comics” as that medium gained popularity in the early twentieth century.”
Source: Wiktionary: 漫画 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.