First opened Thursday, December 31, 2009
下駄
げた
- 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).
(Japanese footwear), wooden clogs
Geta are “lower clogs” — and the “footwear” sense of 駄 may exist only in Japan.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
下駄を突っかけて表に飛び出した。
I slipped on my geta and dashed outside.
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.
- “A surface analysis suggests a Japanese coinage of Middle Chinese-derived components, as a compound of 下(げ) (ge, “lower, under”) + 駄(た) (ta, “loading, carrying; footwear”).”
- “Historical usage suggests a shift from older term 足(あし)駄(だ) (ashida, “clogs”, later, referring more specifically to “tall clogs” in contrast to the “short clogs” referenced by the term 下(げ)駄(た) (geta)), itself deriving from 足(あし) (ashi, “foot”) + 板(いた) (ita, “board”), from the even older practice of wearing flat pieces of wood on one's feet when working in the paddies to keep from sinking into the mud, similar in principle to snowshoes. This latter footwear persisted in use into the 20th century as 田(た)下(げ)駄(た) (tageta, literally “paddy geta”).”
- “The historical derivation indicates that the 駄 character's “footwear” sense, which is specific to Japanese and is not found in Chinese sources, could have arisen from phonetic ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)) usage in the terms 足(あし)駄(だ) (ashida) and 下(げ)駄(た) (geta).”
Source: Wiktionary: 下駄 (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.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.