First opened Wednesday, October 12, 2011
黄金
おうごん
- 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).
gold
Ōgon is from Middle Chinese 黃金 (MC hwang kim, “yellow + metal”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
絵の中の少女は黄金ではなくて花のかんむりをかぶっています。
The girl in the picture is wearing a crown not of gold but of flowers.
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.
- “/wau komʉ/ → /wauɡomʉ/ → /wauɡon/ → /wɔːɡoɴ/ → /oːɡoɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 黃金 (MC hwang kim, “yellow + metal”).”
- “Compare modern Cantonese wong⁴ gam¹.”
Source: Wiktionary: 黄金 (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).
Other readings of 黄金 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おうごん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こうきん
- “/kʷau kimʉ/ → /kʷaukin/ → /kʷɔːkiɴ/ → /koːkiɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 黃金 (MC hwang kim, “yellow + metal”).”
- “Compare modern Min Nan reading hông-kim.”
こがね
- “Shift from Old Japanese 黃金 (kugane).”
- “Equivalent to a compound of 黄 (ko, combining form of ki, “yellow(-coloured)”) + 金 (kane, “metal”). The kane changes to gane as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
きがね
- “Compound of 黄 (ki, “yellow(-coloured)”) + 金 (kane, “metal”).”
- “The kane changes to gane as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.