First opened Saturday, April 14, 2012
長官
ちょうかん
- 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).
chief, (government) secretary
Chōkan is 長 (chō, “chief, leader”) plus 官 (kan, “government official”), either a wasei kango or from Middle Chinese 長官.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
長官は彼に全権を委任した。
The governor invested him with full authority.
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.
- “By surface analysis, 長 (chō, “chief, leader”) + 官 (kan, “government official”). Either a wasei kango from these on'yomi readings, or from Middle Chinese 長官 (sum-of-parts reading: /ɖɨɐŋ kuɑn/).”
Source: Wiktionary: 長官 (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 長官 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ちょうかん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かみ
- “From 上(かみ) (kami, “upper, person above”).”
かん
- “Shift from kami.”
こう
- “Shift from kami. Also compare 神(こう)々(ごう)しい (kōgōshii), a shift from kamigamishii, in which the same kami component also shifts to kō.”
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.