First opened Wednesday, November 14, 2012
惑星
わくせい
- 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).
planet
Wakusei is a calque of Dutch dwaalster (“wander star”), 惑 (waku, “to move about confusedly, to wander”) plus 星 (sei, “star”), coined in 1792 by Motoki Yoshinaga.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
地球は美しい惑星だ。
The earth is a beautiful planet.
地球は惑星の１つです。
The earth is one of the planets.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Wasei kango: Calque of Dutch dwaalster (literally “wander star”), composed as a compound of 惑 (waku, “to move about confusedly, to wander”) + 星 (sei, “star”). Probably related to 熒惑 (MC hweng hwok).”
- Hedged“Coined in 1792 by Dutch-Japanese translator Motoki Yoshinaga in his 太陽窮理了解説 (Taiyō Kyūri Ryōkai Setsu, “Theory of Understanding on the Natural Study of the Sun”), a translation of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and its heliocentric model.”
- “Also cited in the 1805 work 和蘭通舶 (Oranda Tsūhaku, “Holland Liner”) by Shiba Kōkan.”
Source: Wiktionary: 惑星 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.