First opened Tuesday, August 30, 2011
炭素
たんそ
- 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).
carbon (C)
Tanso is 炭 (tan, “coal”) plus 素 (so, “element”), a calque of Dutch koolstof coined by Udagawa Yōan in 1834.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
石炭は大部分が炭素から成っている。
Coal consists mostly of carbon.
炭素排出量の変動が、以下のグラフに描かれている。
The differing volumes of carbon emissions are plotted in the graph below.
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.
- “Compound of 炭 (tan, “coal”) + 素 (so, “element”), calque of Dutch koolstof (literally “coal stuff”), from German Kohlenstoff. Compare also Luxembourgish Kuelestoff, Danish kulstof.”
- “Coined by Japanese scientist Udagawa Yōan in 1834 in his book 遠西医方名物考補遺 (“炭素”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 炭素 (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- 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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.