First opened Saturday, July 30, 2005
鉄
てつ
- flat (heiban)
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).
iron
Tetsu, “iron”, is borrowed from Middle Chinese 鐵 (MC thet); Mandarin reads it tiě.
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 鉄
In a sentence
金は鉄より重い。
Gold is heavier than iron.
鉄は金よりも硬い。
Iron is harder than gold.
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.
- “Borrowed from Middle Chinese 鐵 (MC thet, “iron”). Compare modern Mandarin reading tiě, Hakka thiet.”
Source: Wiktionary: 鉄 (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 鉄 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not てつ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
くろがね
- “Compound of 黒 (kuro, “black”) + 金 (kane, “metal”). The kane changes to gane as an instance of rendaku (連濁). Compare the black in English blacksmith.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.