First opened Tuesday, December 19, 2006
妻
つま
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- 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).
wife (humble)
Tsuma, “wife”, is from 端 (tsuma, “side, edge”): the person at someone's side, compare English better half.
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 妻
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 端 (tsuma, “side, edge”), indicating the person who is at the side of someone: a spouse. Compare the English expression better half.”
- “This term originally referred to either a male (husband) or female (wife) spouse. In modern usage, this term refers only to a female spouse.”
- “By extension from the at the side sense.”
Source: Wiktionary: 妻 (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 妻 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さい
- “From Middle Chinese 妻 (MC tshej|tshejH, “wife”).”
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.