First opened Wednesday, April 18, 2012
怪獣
かいじゅう
- 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).
monster
Kaijū is 怪 (kai, “mysterious”) plus 獣 (jū, “beast”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
次の瞬間ヘラクレスは怪獣を捕まえた。
The next instant Hercules caught hold of the monster.
信じられないだろうけど、その洞窟から怪獣が現れたんだ。
Believe it or not, a monster emerged from the cave.
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.
- “怪(かい) (kai, “mysterious”) + 獣(じゅう) (jū, “beast”)”
- “Comparable terms in other languages: Swedish vidunder, odjur”
Source: Wiktionary: 怪獣 (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.