First opened Saturday, May 26, 2012
悲観
ひかん
- 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).
pessimism, disappointment
Hikan is from the Buddhist Middle Chinese term 悲觀 (“compassionate view”), later reanalyzed as 悲 (“sadness”) plus 観 (“outlook”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は悲観する傾向がある。
He has a tendency to be pessimistic.
彼女は悲観する傾向がある。
She has a tendency to look on the dark side of things.
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 悲觀 (“compassionate view”, literally “view of pity”), a Buddhist term. Compare 慈悲 (jihi, “compassion”). Reanalyzed as 悲 (“sadness”) + 観 (“outlook”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 悲観 (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.