First opened Monday, April 11, 2011
無限
むげん
- 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).
infinite
Mugen may be a learned borrowing from Chinese 無限 (wúxiàn, literally “without + limit”), first cited to 1881 as a translation of English infinite.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
石油の供給は無限ではない。
Supplies of oil are not infinite.
宇宙は無限に膨張し続けるのか？
Will the universe expand indefinitely?
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“May be a learned borrowing from Chinese 無限 /无限 (wúxiàn, literally “without + limit”). First cited to 1881 in the 哲学字彙 (Tetsugaku Jii, “Philosophical Vocabulary”) as a translation of English infinite.”
Source: Wiktionary: 無限 (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.