First opened Sunday, April 1, 2012
汽船
きせん
- 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).
steamship
Kisen was probably coined in Japan from 汽 (ki, “steam”) plus 船 (sen, “boat, ship”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
汽船は見えなくなった。
The steam ship has gone out of sight.
その汽船は香港に立ち寄った。
The liner called at Hong Kong.
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 coined in Japan from Middle Chinese-derived components, as a compound of 汽 (ki, “steam”) + 船 (sen, “boat, ship”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 汽船 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.