First opened Tuesday, February 5, 2008
袖
そで
- 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).
sleeve
Sode, “sleeve”, appears to be 衣 (so, “robe; clothing”) plus 手 (te, “hand; arm”), first attested in the Kojiki of 712.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 袖
In a sentence
無い袖は振れぬ。
You can't spend what you don't have.
ない袖は振れぬ。
An empty bag can't stand upright.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨so₁ te⟩ → /so te/ → /sode/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 with the phonetic spelling 蘇弖 (⟨so₁ te⟩). The te changes to de as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- Hedged“Japanese references that include an etymology note that this appears to be a compound of 衣 (so, “robe; clothing”) + 手 (te, “hand; arm”). However, the initial so- is clearly spelled with the so-called 甲類 (kōrui, “"A" type”) vowel ⟨so₁⟩ in the oldest texts, whereas 衣 when read as so was pronounced with the so-called 乙類 (otsurui, “"B" type”) vowel as ⟨so₂⟩. These were treated as separate vowels in Old Japanese, so this proposed compound cannot be the actual derivation.”
Source: Wiktionary: 袖 (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.