First opened Friday, December 18, 2009
普段
ふだん
- 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).
in everyday situations, usually, ordinarily
“Usually” was written 不断 first — the kanji we use now were fitted to the sound.
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.
In a sentence
彼女は普段早起きだ。
In general, she is an early riser.
私は普段６時に目が覚める。
I usually wake up at six.
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.
- “The kanji spelling is phonetic ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)); originally written as 不断(ふだん) (fudan).”
Source: Wiktionary: 普段 (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.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.