First opened Friday, October 16, 2009
基づく
もとづく
- 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).
to be grounded on, to be based on
To be based on something is to “attach” to a “foundation”.
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.
Written with 基
In a sentence
税金は収入に基づく。
Taxation is based on income.
彼の理論は事実に基づく。
His theory is based on fact.
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 基(もと) (moto, “base, foundation”) + 付(つ)く (tsuku). The tsuku changes to zuku as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 基づく (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).