First opened Wednesday, December 19, 2007
粒
つぶ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
grain
Tsubu is not attested until a Muromachi-period text, and an earlier form tsubi may have preceded it.
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 粒
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “Not attested until a text from the Muromachi period with the spelling ツブ (tsubu).”
- Hedged“An earlier form 粒 (tsubi) exists, which might have been the predecessor to this word; both must have been ultimately derived from a source cognate to つぶら (tsubura, “the state of being round and small”, obsolete).”
Source: Wiktionary: 粒 (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 粒 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つぶ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
つび
- “From Old Japanese 粒 (tubi₂), itself attested since the Shin'yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki of 794:”
- “*”
- “数其滴 古経為_二字_一滴音宅、訓都飛”
- “The number of those kernels; in the old Buddhist sutras, the character 滴 (dī) meaning "kernel" is to be read something like tek^([sic]); the native Japanese reading for this word is tubi₂.”
- “This word, along with 粒 (tsubu), must have been derived from a source cognate to つぶら (tsubura, “the state of being round and small”, obsolete).”
つぼ
- “First cited to a work from the late Muromachi period; this word is a variant of 粒 (tsubu).”
りゅう
- “From Middle Chinese 粒 (MC lip).”
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.