First opened Wednesday, December 5, 2012
天下
てんか
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
the world, whole country
Tenka is from Middle Chinese 天下 (MC then haeX, “heaven + under”), in the kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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“From Middle Chinese 天下 (MC then haeX, “heaven + under”). The kan'on, so likely a later borrowing.”
Source: Wiktionary: 天下 (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).
Other readings of 天下 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not てんか. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
てんげ
- “From Middle Chinese 天下 (MC then haeX, “heaven + under”). The go'on, so likely the earlier borrowing.”
- “Appears with this reading in the Kagerō Nikki, dating to roughly 974 CE. Superseded in modern Japanese by tenka above.”
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.