First opened Friday, September 11, 2009
薬指
くすりゆび
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
ring finger
The ring finger is the “medicine finger”, first cited in 1717.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼女は左手の薬指にダイヤの指輪をはめていた。
She wore a diamond ring on her left third finger.
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 薬 (kusuri, “medicine”) + 指 (yubi, “finger”).”
- “First cited to 1717.”
Source: Wiktionary: 薬指 (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.