First opened Tuesday, November 24, 2009
生地
きじ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
fabric; dough
Fabric or dough is “raw ground” — and the word first meant bare, unlacquered wood.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
この生地は丈夫です。
This cloth wears well.
この生地は長持ちする。
This cloth wears well.
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.
- “⟨kidi⟩ → /kiʑi/”
- “Compound of 生 (ki, “crude, pure, raw”) + 地 (ji, “earth; skin”).”
- “Originally written 木地, a transparent compound of 木 (ki, “wood”) + 地 (di, “earth; skin”), referring to the bare wooden surface of an object before lacquer or paint was applied.”
- “Attested from at least the medieval period in this sense. (First cited in Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam)”
Source: Wiktionary: 生地 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.