First opened Tuesday, July 25, 2017
日中
にっちゅう
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
daytime, broad daylight
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
会社が日中合弁で経営しています。
The company is operating under joint Sino-Japanese management.
彼の叔母が日中彼の犬の世話をしている。
His aunt takes care of his dog during the day.
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.
- “日 (“Japan”) + 中 (“China”) or blend of 日本 (Nihon, Nippon, “Japan”) + 中国 (Chūgoku, “China”)”
- Hedged“From Sinitic 日中. Date of borrowing unknown.”
Source: Wiktionary: 日中 (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 日中 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not にっちゅう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひなか
- “Compound of 日 (hi, “day”) + 中 (naka, “middle”).”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.