First opened Saturday, January 6, 2007
筋
すじ
- 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).
muscle, string, line
Suji is possibly す (*su) plus ち (chi, “life essence, spirit, power; blood; milk”), with chi voiced to ji by rendaku.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 筋
In a sentence
その小説の筋はわからない。
I don't understand this novel's plot.
物語の筋はある島を舞台に展開する。
The action of the story takes place on an island.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *suntuy ~ *sunti.”
- Hedged“Possibly a compound of す (*su, unknown, possibly the same source as 脛(すね) (sune, “shin”)) + 霊(ち), 血(ち), 乳(ち) (chi, “life essence, spirit, power; blood; milk”), with the chi changing to ji due to rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 筋 (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.