First opened Tuesday, March 7, 2006
塔
とう
- 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).
tower, pagoda
Tō, “tower”, abbreviates 卒塔婆 (sotoba), a transliteration of Sanskrit stūpa, “heap”.
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 塔
In a sentence
あれは塔です。
That is a pagoda.
遠くに塔が見えた。
We saw the tower in the distance.
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.
- “/tapu/ → /taɸu/ → */tawu/ → /tau/ → /tɔː/ → /toː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 塔 (MC thap, “tower, pagoda, spire”).”
- “An abbreviation for 卒塔婆 (sotoba, sotōba), a transliteration of Sanskrit स्तूप (stūpa, “heap”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 塔 (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 塔 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not とう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あららぎ
- “First appears in the Engishiki compilation of laws created in the early 900s, spelled phonetically in kanji as 阿良良伎. Spelled as 蘭, araragi literally means “wild onion” and refers to the wild rocambole, possibly hardneck garlic, notable for its tall green stalk sticking straight up. Used as a euphemism for 塔 (tafu at the time), as that word's Buddhist connotations were viewed as taboo in contexts having to do with the religious center of Itsuki no Miya (斎宮, also known as Saikū).”
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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.