First opened Tuesday, April 25, 2006
断つ
たつ
- 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).
to sever, to cut off
Tatsu, “to sever”, resembles Proto-Tai *tacᴰ (“to cut”), though the page offers it only as a similarity.
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 断
In a sentence
彼女はきっぱり断った。
She refused outright.
彼らは食料の供給を断たれた。
They were cut off from food supplies.
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.
- “Note similarities to Proto-Tai *tacᴰ (“to cut”) (whence Thai ตัด (dtàt, “to cut”)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 断つ (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.