First opened Monday, January 7, 2008
閉じる
とじる
- 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).
to close (e.g., book, eyes), to shut
Tojiru is from Old Japanese 閉づ (tozu), and the distinction between ぢ and じ was lost over time.
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 閉
In a sentence
本を閉じなさい。
Close your book.
傘を閉じました。
I closed my umbrella.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Derived from older form 閉(と)づ (tozu) via regular historical processes in the shift to the 上一段活用 (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”) pattern. Over time, the distinction between ぢ (dji) and じ (ji) was lost, leading to the modern spelling of とじる (tojiru).”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 上(かみ)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami nidan katsuyō, “upper bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 上(かみ)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -iru. For the Old / Classical form, see the 閉づ entry.”
Source: Wiktionary: 閉じる (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.