First opened Wednesday, January 24, 2007
外
そと
- 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).
outside, exterior
Soto appears from roughly the Muromachi period, likely 背 (so, “back, behind”) plus 外 (to, “outside”) or 所 (to, “place”).
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 外
In a sentence
外へ出たい。
I feel like going out.
彼は窓の外を見た。
He looked out of the window.
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.
- Hedged“Appears from roughly the Muromachi period, superseding earlier to reading (see below). Likely a compound of either 背 (so, “back, behind”, ancient reading found in compounds) + 外 (to, “outside”), or 背 (so, “back, behind”, ancient reading found in compounds) + 所 (to, “place”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 外 (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 外 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not そと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
がい・げ
- “From Middle Chinese 外 (MC ngwajH).”
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.