First opened Friday, November 20, 2009
違う
ちがう
- 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).
to be different; to differ; wrong
“To differ” began as “roads that cross” — dated to 974.
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 違
In a sentence
どう違うんだ？
What's the difference?
馬はロバと違う。
Horses are distinct from donkeys.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Compound of 道 (chi, “road, way”) + 交う (kau, “cross, exchange”). The kau changes to gau as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- Hedged“First cited to the Kagerō Nikki of 974, and likely extant earlier given the initial citing in 965 of derived form 違える (chigaeru, “to keep something from happening”)”
- “Similar, but not related, to tagau reading.”
Source: Wiktionary: 違う (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 違う on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ちがう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
たがう
- “From Old Japanese. Compound of 手 (ta, “hand”, bound form) + 交う (kau, “cross, exchange”). The kau changes to gau as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “First cited to the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).