First opened Sunday, September 13, 2009
国境
こっきょう
- 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).
national or state border
The national border was already in the 706 record — and a native reading, kunizakai, sits behind the same spelling.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 Middle Chinese 國境 (MC kwok kjaengX). First attested in a portion of the Shoku Nihongi dated to 706.”
Source: Wiktionary: 国境 (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 国境 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こっきょう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
くにざかい
- “Compound of 国(くに) (kuni, “province; country”) + 境(さかい) (sakai, “border”). The sakai changes to zakai as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “First attested in 1660.”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.