First opened Friday, October 2, 2009
財布
さいふ
- 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).
wallet
A wallet is “wealth” plus “cloth” — a Japanese coinage found in texts from 1675.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
ほら財布だ。
Here's my wallet.
彼に財布を渡して。
Just give him the wallet.
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“Appears to be a Japanese coinage based on Middle Chinese-derived roots, as a compound of 財 (sai, “wealth, money”) + 布 (fu, “cloth [pouch]”). Found in texts starting from 1675.”
Source: Wiktionary: 財布 (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
- 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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.