First opened Monday, January 2, 2012
革命
かくめい
- 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).
revolution
Kakumei is from Middle Chinese 革命 (“to switch to a new dynasty/regime”), and Fukuzawa Yukichi used it to translate English revolution.
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
その国に革命が起こった。
A revolution broke out in that country.
メキシコで革命が起こった。
A revolution broke out in Mexico.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 革命 (MC keak mjaengH, “to switch to a new dynasty/regime”). This word has been used for a long time in Japan, starting from the introduction of I Ching (易經). Fukuzawa Yukichi (福󠄁澤 諭󠄀吉), in Western Affairs (『西洋事情』, 1866–1870), used this word as a translation of the English word "revolution", and it was later popularised by Nakae Chōmin (中江 兆民) and others.”
Source: Wiktionary: 革命 (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.