First opened Tuesday, March 13, 2007
踏切
ふみきり
- 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).
railway crossing, level crossing, starting line, scratch, crossover
Fumikiri is fumi, the stem of 踏む (fumu, “step on”), plus kiri, the stem of 切る (kiru).
Taken apart
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In a sentence
警報機が鳴っているときは絶対に踏切を渡らないでください。
Don't cross the tracks when the alarm is ringing.
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.
- “From 踏(ふ)み (fumi, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 踏(ふ)む (fumu, “step on, tread on, stamp”).) + 切(き)り (kiri, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 切(き)る (kiru, “perform an action as if by cutting”).).”
Source: Wiktionary: 踏切 (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.