First opened Wednesday, August 10, 2011
平方
へいほう
- 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).
square (e.g., meter, square)
Heihō is probably from Chinese 平方 (píngfāng, literally “flat square”), first attested in Japanese in 1875.
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
彼の牧場は、２０平方マイルに及んでいる。
His ranch covers twenty square miles.
縦横８フィートの部屋の面積は６４平方フィートである。
The area of an 8-foot square room is 64 square feet.
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“Probably from Chinese 平方 (píngfāng, literally "flat square", "flat" because it accounts for 2 dimensions only). Compare 立方 (rippō, “cube”, literally "standing square", accounting for the third dimension).”
- “First attested in Japanese in a text from 1875.”
Source: Wiktionary: 平方 (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.