First opened Saturday, April 20, 2013
ニュアンス
ニュアンス
- 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).
nuance
ニュアンス is listed as borrowed from French nuance or English nuance, and is first cited to a 1909 book by Nagai Kafū.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
その言葉には微妙なニュアンスがある。
This word has a subtle nuance to it.
彼女の考えと私の考えでは少しニュアンスが違う。
There's a slight difference between her thinking and mine.
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.
- “Listed as borrowed from French nuance or English nuance.”
- “Some Japanese sources do not indicate a source language and only list the etymon form, as nuance, which is the format in these works to indicate an origin from English. Other references explicitly list both French and English as source languages, or just French.”
- “First cited to ふらんす物語 (Furansu Monogatari), a 1909 book by 永井荷風 (Nagai Kafū).”
Source: Wiktionary: ニュアンス (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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.