First opened Wednesday, February 7, 2007
所
ところ
- 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).
place
Tokoro is likely cognate with 床 (toko, “raised area; bed”), and first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.
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 所
In a sentence
信じるとこよ。
I almost believe you.
ところにより雨。
It rains in some places.
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.
- “⟨to₂ko₂ro₂⟩ → /tokoro/”
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Proto-Japonic *təkərə. Likely cognate with 床 (toko, “raised area; bed”).”
- Hedged“A surface analysis suggests that this could be an ancient compound of ⟨to₂⟩ (Proto-Japonic *to (“place”), as in 跡 ⟨ato₂⟩, “footprint, track”, from “foot place, where one has stepped”) + ⟨ko₂⟩ (noun-forming suffixing element denoting “place”, as in ここ ⟨ko₂ko₂⟩, “here”, from “this place”) + ⟨ro₂⟩ (noun-forming suffixing element, apparently indicating within a general area, possibly as in 心 ⟨ko₂ko₂ro₂⟩, “heart, mind, emotions”, 頃 ⟨ko₂ro₂⟩, “general span of time, around a certain time”, うつろ ⟨uturo₂⟩, “hollowness, empty interior”).”
- “Listed in some sources as an abbreviation of tokoro above. However, this is also listed as cognate with 床 (toko, “raised area; bed”), which term already appears in use as far back as the Kojiki (712 CE), one of the oldest Japanese texts.”
Source: Wiktionary: 所 (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 所 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ところ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しょ
- “From Middle Chinese 所 (MC srjoX).”
と
- “⟨to₁⟩ → /*tʷo/ → /to/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *to. Appears mainly as an affixing element indicating place, as in 後 (ato, “after; behind; the back of something”), from 跡 (ato, “footprint, track”), itself a compound of 足 (a, “foot”) + 所 (to, “place”); or in 留まる (todomaru, “to stop in a place”), itself a compound of と (to, “place”) + とまる (tomaru, “to stop”).”
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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.