First opened Friday, June 26, 2009
常に
つねに
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
always (same as いつも) (written expression)
“Always” is “constancy” with an adverbial に on the end.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 常
In a sentence
火は常に危険だ。
Fire is always dangerous.
常に正しい事をせよ。
Always do what is right.
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.
- “Compound of Old Japanese 常 (tsune, “constancy, permanence, forever”) + に (ni, adverbial particle).”
Source: Wiktionary: 常に (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.