First opened Friday, March 16, 2007
薬
くすり
- 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).
medicine
Kusuri appears to be the stem of an unattested verb kusuru, “to have a mystical effect”.
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 薬
In a sentence
薬が効いた。
The medicine has worked.
お薬飲んだ？
Have you taken your medicine yet?
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“From Proto-Japonic *kusori. Appears to be the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or noun form”) of unattested verb kusuru “to have a mystical effect”.”
- “From Old Japanese. Cognate with the kusu root of adjective 奇し (kusushi, “mystical”), from the way that drugs and medicines would have mystical effects. It is not clear whether this is a contraction or the original form.”
Source: Wiktionary: 薬 (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 薬 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くすり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
やく
- “From Middle Chinese 藥 (MC yak). Compare modern Cantonese 藥／药 (joek6).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.