First opened Friday, June 15, 2012
健全
けんぜん
- 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).
health, soundness, wholesome
Kenzen was first used by Sugita Gendan to translate Dutch gezond, in the 1867 book 健全学.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
母子ともに健全です。
Mother and child are both doing well.
彼の考え方は健全です。
His way of thinking is sound.
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.
- “First used by Gendan Sugita (杉田玄端) for the translation of Dutch gezond. Appeared in the book 健全学 (1867) which is a doubly translated version of The Book of Health (1850) by Robert James Mann from Dutch translation.”
- “* 『ゲゾント』とは無病健全の義 - 健全学 (1867)”
Source: Wiktionary: 健全 (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.