First opened Tuesday, November 8, 2005
故郷
こきょう
- 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).
hometown
Kokyō is from Middle Chinese 故鄉 (MC kuH xjang), and its vowels shifted twice on the way.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
久しぶりに故郷に帰ると、懐かしい気持ちが込み上がる。
Returning to your hometown after a long time fills you with nostalgia.
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.
- “/kokʲau/ → /kokʲɔː/ → /kokʲoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 故鄉 (MC kuH xjang).”
Source: Wiktionary: 故郷 (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 故郷 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こきょう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
くに
- “Compare the senses of “sovereign state” and “rural area” in English country.”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.