First opened Thursday, April 3, 2008
爪
つめ
- 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).
fingernail or toenail
Tsume is from Proto-Japonic *tumay, the standalone form of tsuma.
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 爪
In a sentence
猫はつめを引っ込めた。
The cat retracted its claws.
つめを噛むんじゃない。
Don't bite your nails.
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, in turn from Proto-Japonic *tumay. The standalone form of tsuma below.”
Source: Wiktionary: 爪 (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 爪 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つめ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
つま
- “From Old Japanese. The root form of tsume above, generally only used in compounds. Cognate with 端 (tsuma, “edge, side of something”) and 妻 (tsuma, “wife”, original sense of “spouse”).”
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.