First opened Monday, July 10, 2006
築く
きずく
- middle-high (nakadaka): 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).
to build, to establish
Kizuku is, by surface analysis, 杵 (ki, “mallet, pounder, pestle”) plus 築く (tsuku, “to build up”): “to make something using a pounder or mallet”.
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 築
In a sentence
彼は富を築いた。
He heaped up a fortune.
彼は貿易で財産を築いた。
He made his fortune from commerce.
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 Old Japanese, attested in the Izumo Fudoki completed in 733.”
- “By surface analysis, 杵 (ki, “mallet, pounder, pestle”, from which きね (kine) “pestle” is also derived) + 築く (tsuku, “to build up, to pile up, to amass”, see below), for a base sense of “to make something using a pounder or mallet”, much as when building up rammed earth or stonework.”
- “This term as 杵 (ki, “pounder”) + 築く (tsuku, “build up”) then underwent conflation with, or was reanalysed as, 城 (ki, “castle, fortress”) + 築く (tsuku, “build up”) with a basic sense of “to construct”. This latter derivation is given as the only etymology in some references. However, the “to construct” sense is attested centuries later in 1081. Moreover, the “castle, fortress” sense for the initial ki- element was pronounced in Old Japanese as /ki₂/, while the “pounder, mallet” sense was pronounced /ki₁/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 築く (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 築く on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not きずく. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
つく
- “From Old Japanese. Cognate with Japanese 突く (tsuku).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.