First opened Wednesday, July 18, 2007
刀
かたな
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
sword, saber
In katana, 刀 first appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, but the katana furigana appears only centuries later.
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 刀
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 Old Japanese. 刀 first appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE. The furigana カ・タ・ナ for the phonetic attestation of katana only appears centuries later; however, the reading of 刀 in the Nihon Shoki and the Man'yoshu has been generally interpreted as identical to the reconstructed Proto-Japonic *katana.”
- “Commonly suggested as a compound of 片 (kata, “one side”) + な (na, “edge”). This na element is spelled in monolingual Japanese sources as 刃 (“edge, blade”), but there is no historical attestation for any na reading for this character. A comparison with Middle Korean ᄂᆞᆶ〮 (nólh, “blade”) and modern Korean 날 (nal) suggests a Koreanic origin for this latter element. Vovin suggests an Old Korean coordinate term *xʌtʌŋ-nʌrh, due to the nature of the introduction of the specific type of single-edged sabers that are used with katana, mostly introduced from Korea from the 11th century onwards. Compare 直刀 chokutō for a more common reading of 刀 (“sword”) prior to the 11th century.”
Source: Wiktionary: 刀 (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 刀 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かたな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
とう
- “/tau/ → /tɔː/ → /toː/”
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 刀 (MC taw). Compare modern Mandarin 刀 (dāo).”
- “First cited as an independent noun to a text from 1895. Cited in compounds since at least the 800s CE.”
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.