First opened Friday, December 15, 2006
傷
きず
- flat (heiban)
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).
wound, injury, hurt
Kizu's apparent relation to 切る (kiru, “to cut”) is rejected by the mid-vowel preservation in its Ryukyuan cognates.
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 傷
In a sentence
彼女の後頭部の傷から血が流れている。
Blood is flowing from the wound at the back of her head.
羽に深い傷を負った小鳥を見つけました。
I found a bird whose wing was severely damaged.
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.
- “⟨ki₁zu⟩ → */kizu/ → /kizu/”
- “From Old Japanese 瑕 (ki₁zu).”
- “Any apparent relation to verb 切(き)る (kiru, “to cut”) is rejected by mid-vowel preservation of its Ryukyuan cognates.”
Source: Wiktionary: 傷 (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 傷 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not きず. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しょう
- “/sjau/ → /sʲɔː/ → /sʲoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 傷 (MC syang).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.