First opened Sunday, September 23, 2007
切り
きり
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
limits, place to leave off
Kiri is the continuative stem of 切る (kiru, “to cut”).
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 切
In a sentence
彼は病気でずっと床についたきりだ。
He has been confined to his bed with illness.
彼は３８歳なのに両親に頼りきりです。
Though 38, he is still dependent on his parents.
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.
- “連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 切(き)る (kiru, “to cut”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 切り (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 切り on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not きり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぎり
- “From 切(き)り (kiri) above. The kiri changes to giri as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
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.