First opened Friday, June 10, 2005
鎖
くさり
- flat (heiban)
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
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).
chain
Kusari, “chain”, is a noun from the stem of the verb 鏈る (kusaru, “to be linked together”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 鎖
In a sentence
犬は柱に鎖でつながれていた。
The dog was chained to the post.
囚人たちは鎖につながれている。
The prisoners are in chains.
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.
- “Noun derived from the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem form”) of verb 鏈る (kusaru, “to be linked together, to link together”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 鎖 (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 鎖 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くさり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
とざし
- “Noun derived from the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem form”) of verb 鎖す (tozasu, “to shut and lock a door or gate”).”
つがり
- “Noun derived from the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem form”) of verb 連る (tsugaru, “to continue, to lead onto the next, to be connected; to connect or link together”).”
さ
- “From Middle Chinese 鎻 or 鎖 (MC swaX). Compare modern Mandarin 鎖 /锁 (suǒ, “lock, padlock; shackles, chains”).”
- “Only used in compounds in modern Japanese.”
じょう
- “Alteration from sau, itself an alternative reading of sa above, possibly influenced by an early variety of Mandarin reading suǒ or Cantonese reading so². The shift from sau to jau (modern jō) was probably the influence of the reading of synonymous character 錠 (jō).”
- “/sa/ → /sau/ → /d͡ʑau/ → /d͡ʑoː/”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.