First opened Saturday, January 15, 2011
質問
しつもん
- 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).
question, inquiry
Shitsumon is literally “quality + ask” in Middle Chinese, and is first attested in 1771.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
よい質問だ。
Good question!
質問をどうぞ。
Ask your question.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Ultimately from Middle Chinese 質問 (MC tsyit mjunH, literally “quality + ask”), apparently borrowed later as a learned borrowing from Literary Chinese of the same source term.”
- “First attested in 1771.”
Source: Wiktionary: 質問 (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.