First opened Monday, August 24, 2009
下手
へた
- 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).
unskillful, poor
“Unskilled” may be “at the edge” of what you can do.
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
彼は字が下手だ。
His handwriting is poor.
彼は運転が下手だ。
He is a bad driver.
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.
- Hedged“Probably a semantic shift from 端 (heta, “edge of something”), referring metaphorically to the edge of one's abilities or knowledge.”
- Hedged“The kanji spelling appears to be an instance of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 下手 (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 下手 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not へた. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
したで・したて
- “Compound of 下 (shita, “down; under; lower”) + 手 (te, “hand”).”
- “Occasionally encountered with rendaku (連濁), where the -te ending changes to -de.”
しもて
- “Compound of 下 (shimo, “lower”) + 手 (te, “hand”).”
くだりて
- “Compound of 下り (kudari, “descending”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 下る (kudaru, “to descend, to go down”)) + 手 (te, “hand; side, direction”).”
げしゅ
- “From Middle Chinese 下手 (MC haeX|haeH syuwX).”
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.