First opened Wednesday, July 8, 2009
仕事
しごと
- 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).
work, job, occupation, employment
Work is “doing” plus “thing”, and the 仕 is only ateji.
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.
In a sentence
さあ仕事だ。
Let's get down to business.
仕事どうなの？
How's your job?
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 し (shi, “doing”, continuative form of する (suru, “to do”)) + 事 (koto, “thing; stuff”). The koto reading for 事 changes to goto as an instance of rendaku (連濁). 仕 is ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 仕事 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.