First opened Wednesday, June 24, 2009
但し
ただし
- 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).
but, however, provided that
The “however” that opens a caveat is a “just” with an emphatic particle on the end.
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 但
In a sentence
ただし、調子に乗ると失敗を招くので注意！
However if you get carried away you'll risk failure so take care!
ただし、列をつくって並ばなくてはならないが・・・。
However, you have to queue...
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 ただし, from ただ (tada, “just, but”) + し (shi, emphatic particle).”
Source: Wiktionary: 但し (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.