First opened Saturday, December 22, 2007
相続
そうぞく
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
succession, inheritance
Sōzoku is Middle Chinese 相續, literally “successively, one after another + to succeed, to continue”, first attested in Japanese in 820.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
財産を相続する。
I succeed to a fortune.
私は莫大な遺産を相続した。
I came into a huge fortune.
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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 相續 (sjangH zjowk, literally “successively, one after another + to succeed, to continue”). First attested in Japanese in 820.”
Source: Wiktionary: 相続 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.