First opened Sunday, May 20, 2012
パチンコ
パチンコ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
pachinko (Japanese pinball)
パチンコ appears from the Taishō period, a compound of ぱちん (pachin, onomatopoeia for a small hard thing striking something else) plus 子 (-ko).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
彼がパチンコするなんて絶対にないよ。
He wouldn't be caught dead playing pachinko.
私たちは、パチンコをして時を過ごした。
We passed the time playing pachinko.
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.
- “Appears from the Taishō period in the early 1900s.”
- “Compound of ぱちん (pachin, onomatopoeia for a small hard thing striking something else; compare English kaching) + 子 (-ko, suffix used to form nouns, often diminutive).”
- “A pinball-like children's game was first called ガチャンコ (gachanko) of similar derivation, with this more gambling-oriented machine becoming popular from around 1947.”
Source: Wiktionary: パチンコ (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.