Word.ws English Dictionary

shinkansen

shinkansen noun: a Japanese high-speed railway line.

Noun

shinkansen (plural shinkansen or shinkansens)

  1. A Japanese high-speed railway line.
  2. A high-speed passenger train which runs on such a line; a bullet train.
    • East Japan Railway Co., known as JR East, this week unveiled its newest luxury shinkansen cars featuring ashiyu, in which passengers can soak their tired feet while speeding through the beautiful, mountainous, hot-spring-rich region.2014 July 2, Yoko Sudo, “Luxury Shinkansen Train to Feature Foot Baths”, in The Wall Street Journal

Forms of shinkansen

pluralshinkansen
pluralshinkansens

Origin of shinkansen

From Japanese 新(しん)幹(かん)線(せん) (shinkansen, literally “new trunk line”).

Words formed from shinkansen

Questions about shinkansen

What does shinkansen mean?
Shinkansen means a Japanese high-speed railway line.
What part of speech is shinkansen?
Shinkansen is a noun.
What is the plural of shinkansen?
The plural of shinkansen is shinkansen.

Words near shinkansen in the dictionary

  1. shinju
  2. Shinjuku
  3. Shinjō
  4. shink
  5. Shinkali
  6. shinkansen
  7. shinkansens
  8. shinked
  9. shinkeishitsu
  10. Shinkin-ap-Morgan
  11. shinking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shinkansen (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “shinkansen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shinkansen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.