kanji

The word 'kanji' entered English as a direct borrowing from Japanese in the 20th century, reflecting the growing Western interest in Japanese language and culture. In Japanese, the term originates from the Chinese phrase 'hànzì', which literally means 'Han characters', denoting the writing system developed during China's Han dynasty. When these characters were imported into Japan, the Japanese reading of the Chinese logographs produced the term 'kanji'. Thus, the English word carries within it a layered history of cultural transmission, from Chinese innovation to Japanese adaptation, and finally to Western lexical adoption to specifically denote the Chinese-derived characters used in the Japanese writing system.

This is a loanword from Japanese. The Japanese term 'kanji' (漢字) is itself a compound of 'kan' (漢), referring to China or the Han dynasty, and 'ji' (字), meaning 'character' or 'letter'. In the English borrowing, the word is treated as an unsegmentable simplex.