First opened Thursday, May 25, 2006
陸
りく
- flat (heiban)
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
land, shore
Riku, “land”, is from Middle Chinese 陸, first attested as a standalone noun in the mid-1400s.
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 陸
In a sentence
陸が見えてきた。
Land came in sight.
遠くに陸が見えた。
I saw land 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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 陸 (MC ljuwk). First attested in Japanese as a standalone noun in a text from the mid-1400s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 陸 (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 陸 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not りく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ろく
- “Originally referred to "flat" in reference to flat land, in turn the core meaning of the kanji character.”
- “The alternative 碌 spelling is an example of ateji.”
- “First attested in the 羅葡日辞書 (Ra-Ho-Nichi Jisho, “Latin-Portuguese-Japanese Dictionary”) of 1595.”
ろく
- “Substitute spelling for 六 (roku, “six”), likely borrowed from similar usage of written Chinese 陸 /陆 (“six”).”
くが
- “*⟨kuniga⟩ → *⟨kunuga⟩ → /kunuɡa/ → */kunɡa/ → /kuɡa/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
- “Shift from Old Japanese 陸 (kunuga), also attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, itself a shift from *kuniga, a compound of 国 (kuni, “country, land”) + 処 (-ka, suffix indicating place). The ka changes to ga as an instance of rendaku (連濁). The shift to kunuga may have been by analogy to 国内(くぬち) (kunuchi), whose pronunciation is explainable by regular Old Japanese vowel elision processes.”
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.