人口
Meaning in Englishpopulation, number of people
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
What does 人口 (jinkou) mean? It refers to the total number of people living in a defined area (a city, region, or country) and is used to describe how many inhabitants occupy that place for demographic, planning, and statistical purposes.
Main meanings
- As a statistical headcount emphasizing the number of residents rather than households or visitors.
- Used to express demographic trends such as growth, decline, or migration patterns in a region.
- Functions as the root for technical measures and compound terms related to people distribution and density.
- In casual speech, used to indicate how crowded or sparsely populated a place feels.
How to use it
Common in news reports, government statistics, academic writing, urban planning, and everyday conversation when referring to the size or change of a population; appropriate in both formal and neutral registers and frequently appears combined with numbers or with terms describing density, growth, and distribution.
Variants and close terms
- 人口数 (jinkōsū) — population count
- 住民 (jūmin) — residents
- 居住者 (kyojūsha) — inhabitants
- 過疎 (kasō) — depopulation (antonymic concept)
Composition
- 人 (hito): person, human
- 口 (kuchi): mouth; here it metaphorically represents units to be counted (like 'mouths' to feed)
- Combined, the characters convey the idea of counting people — the number of 'mouths' in a place, i.e., its population.
Origin
The concept became standardized in modern Japanese during the Meiji period alongside Western-style statistics; nationwide modern censuses and formal demographic reporting emerged in the late 19th to early 20th century, making the term central to government planning, urbanization, and social policy.
Word class
noun (名詞, compound noun)