First opened Monday, October 3, 2005
足袋
たび
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
Japanese socks (with split toe)
The old spelling of tabi, 単皮, means a single (単) hide (皮): originally a leather shoe.
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.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “/taɴbi/ → /tabi/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from tanbi, the expected regular goon compound reading for the 単皮 spelling, which appears in the Wamyō Ruijushō of 938 CE.”
- “Originally referred to a leather shoe, which could be made from a single (単) animal hide (皮). As footwear in Japan developed, so too did the sense of tabi. The modern sense of a split-toed sock arose from at least the late Kamakura period, around the late 1200s, early 1300s. However, the leather shoe sense was still in use in 1603, as evidenced by the relevant entry in the Nippo Jisho.”
- Hedged“The shift in reading was possibly influenced by the regular kun'yomi tabi of the term 旅 (tabi, “travel, voyage, trip”), as the tabi footwear was often worn for travel.”
Source: Wiktionary: 足袋 (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).
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.