First opened Sunday, October 30, 2005
杉
すぎ
- 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).
Japanese cedar
Sugi's kanji 杉 is an ateji (当て字), and the word is first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.
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 杉
In a sentence
昔そこにはスギの大木があった。
There used to be a large cedar tree there.
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.
- “From Old Japanese 杉 (sugi₂), which Miyake (1997) (apud Schuessler, 2007) associates with Old Chinese 松 (OC *sɢloŋ). Ultimately comes from reconstructed Proto-Japonic *sunkOi.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “This kanji is an ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 杉 (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.