First opened Sunday, January 6, 2013
感染
かんせん
- 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).
infection, contagion
Kansen was coined in 1872 by Okuyama Torafumi in 医語類聚 (Igo ruiju) as a translation of English affection.
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
それは細菌感染に有効だ。
It is effective against bacterial infections.
政府は感染が広がることを予防する適切な措置を取らなかった。
The government didn't take appropriate measures to prevent the infection from spreading.
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.
- “Coined by Japanese medical scientist Okuyama Torafumi in 1872 in his work 医語類聚 (Igo ruiju) as a translation of English affection.”
Source: Wiktionary: 感染 (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.