In Japan: financial circles; the business world or power elite who control it.
1968
A new postwar term, zaikai,..practically supersedes zaibatsu... It is frequently interpreted..as a synonym for ‘business circles’, ‘financial circles’, and even ‘business community’. More inclusive than zaibatu, it is nevertheless restricted to big business... Zaikai also denotes the place where the craving for political power is openly expressed and gratified.
C. Yanaga, Big Business in Japanese Politics ii. 32
1970
A Japanese economic magazine recently conducted a survey of opinion among leading representatives of the zaikai, the world of business and high finance.
Times 19 August 5/2
1975
The men who make up this elite in Japan spend an extraordinary amount of time in so-called zaikai activities..that are not directly related to their own companies, but which seek to represent the interests of the business community as a whole.
G. L. Curtis in E. F. Vogel, Modern Japanese Organization & Decision-Making 38
1981
The process of nemawashi operating in the senior levels of the zaikai world enable the companies to secure long-term goals.
J. B. Kidd in P. G. O'Neill, Tradition & Modern Japan 50
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
zaikai typically occurs about 0.02 times per million words in modern written English.
zaikai is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zaikai, n., 1960–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1960
0.026
1970
0.022
1980
0.019
1990
0.019
2000
0.022
2010
0.019
zaikai, n. was first published in 1986; not fully revised.