First opened Thursday, April 28, 2011
神経
しんけい
- 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).
nerve, sensitivity
Shinkei was first used in the Kaitai Shinsho of 1774 by Sugita Genpaku and others, translating the Dutch zenuw.
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
神経は抜くのですか。
Are you going to remove the nerve?
神経を抜く必要があります。
I have to remove your nerve.
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.
- “The word 神(しん)経(けい) (shinkei) was first used in a book called Kaitai Shinsho (解体新書) published in Japan in 1774 by Sugita Genpaku (杉田玄白) and others as a translation of "Ontleedkundige Tafelen", the Dutch version of the original German book called "Anatomische Tabellen."”
- Hedged“In order to translate the Dutch term "zenuw", Genpaku coined the word 神(しん)経(けい) (shinkei) by combining the word 神(しん)気(き) (shinki, “life energy”) and 経(けい)脈(みゃく) (keimyaku, “network of paths”). The original German medical book was published in 1734, and Genpaku and his colleagues spent three years translating the Dutch version and it is recognized as the first Japanese publication relating to the human anatomy as understood by the western medical science. The Dutch version was used because that was perhaps the only foreign language familiar to Japanese at that time as Dutch shipping was the only authorized merchant ships to enter Nagasaki, the only open port recognized by the Tokugawa Shogunate while Japan refused to deal with outside world under the strict isolation policy in effect at that time.”
Source: Wiktionary: 神経 (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.