First opened Wednesday, November 11, 2009
椅子
いす
- 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).
chair
The chair began as a seat for court officials and came to mean the wooden seat of a Zen priest.
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
座るいすがないな。
There's no chair to sit upon.
なあに、その椅子？
What's this chair doing here?
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.
- “/isi/ → /isɨ/ → /isu/”
- Hedged“Originally 倚子 (ishi), referring to seats with or without rests used by higher court officials. With the arrival of Zen Buddhism to Japan, possibly a later borrowing from Middle Chinese 椅子 (MC 'jeX tsiX) or directly from Mandarin 椅子 (yǐzi, literally "chair" + diminutive suffix), the meaning shifted to wooden seats used by priests.”
Source: Wiktionary: 椅子 (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.