First opened Sunday, October 30, 2011
給食
きゅうしょく
- 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).
school lunch, providing a meal
Kyūshoku is ultimately from Middle Chinese 給食, literally “to give, to supply + food, meal”, sourced from the Records of the Grand Historian.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
給食はあるの？
Do you have lunch at school?
彼は給食を食べに行くという趣旨のメモを残した。
He left a note to the effect that he was going out for lunch.
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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 給食 (MC kip zyik, literally “to give, to supply + food, meal”). Sourced from the Chinese work 史記 /史记 (Shǐjì, “Records of the Grand Historian”) completed in 91 BCE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 給食 (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.