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First opened Wednesday, August 13, 2008

旅

たび

  • tail-high (odaka): 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).

travel, trip, journey

JLPT N3Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)和語 · Native JapaneseSound change

旅, “travel, trip”, may be cognate with 度 (tabi), with the same pitch accent and ancient vowel values.

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 旅

In a sentence

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.

  • “/tabi₁/ → /tabi/”
  • “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Man'yōshū, completed no earlier than 759 and one of the oldest extant texts in the Japanese language.”
  • Hedged“May be cognate with 度 (tabi, “the time when something happens”); both terms have the same pitch accent, the same ancient vowel values, and some semantic overlap.”

Source: Wiktionary: 旅 (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 旅 on the same Wiktionary page

These describe other words written the same way, not たび. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.

りょ

  • “From Middle Chinese 旅 (MC ljoX, “a military unit of 500 men; to go [on a sortie; on a trip or journey]”).”

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.
Sound change
The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.

Also read たび

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 旅This word

    travel, trip, journey

    たび↓ tail-high (odaka)

  • 足袋

    Japanese socks (with split toe)

    た↓び head-high (atamadaka)

  • 度

    counter for occurrences

    たび↓ tail-high (odaka)

More like this

Other words so far that share a part, a process or a layer with this one, closest first. Each tag says what is shared; nothing here is a claim beyond what the entries already show.

Also opened on August 13

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

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Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it