NipponDailyNipponDaily
All words

First opened Tuesday, January 31, 2006

州

しゅう

  • 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).

state, province

JLPT N3Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)noun, used as a suffix漢語 · Sino-JapaneseBorrowing

Shū, “state”, is from Middle Chinese 州, and 州 is a daiyōji replacing 洲.

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 州

In a sentence

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 Middle Chinese 州 (MC tsyuw).”
  • “From Middle Chinese 洲 (MC tsyuw). 州 is a daiyōji replacing 洲.”

Source: Wiktionary: 州 (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

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.

Related in the dictionary

The words JMdict points to from this word's sense. A word that has opened links to its day; the others are named as JMdict writes them.

See also
  • 国くにcountry; place of origin

Also read しゅう

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 州This word

    state, province

    しゅ↓う head-high (atamadaka)

  • 衆

    masses, people

    しゅ↓う head-high (atamadaka)

  • 週

    week

    しゅ↓う head-high (atamadaka)

Also opened on January 31

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

© 2025 - 2026 NipponDaily. Released under the Apache-2.0 License.

Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it