First opened Friday, June 3, 2011
貴族
きぞく
- 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).
noble, aristocrat
Kizoku appears to be coined in Japanese from 貴 (ki, “noble”) plus 族 (zoku, “clan, tribe, family”), first attested in Fukuzawa Yukichi's writing of the late 1860s.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は純粋の貴族だ。
He's a genuine aristocrat.
貴族に列せられた。
He was created a peer.
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“Appears to be coined in Japanese of Middle Chinese-derived components, as a compound of 貴 (ki, “noble”) + 族 (zoku, “clan, tribe, family”). First attested in the late 1860s in the writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi.”
Source: Wiktionary: 貴族 (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.