First opened Friday, July 20, 2007
手拭い
てぬぐい
- 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).
(hand) towel
Tenugui is 手 (te, “hand”) plus 拭い (nugui, “wiping; wiper”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
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.
- “Compound of 手 (te, “hand”) + 拭い (nugui, “wiping; wiper”, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 拭(ぬぐ)う (nuguu, “to wipe”).).”
Source: Wiktionary: 手拭い (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.