First opened Sunday, January 17, 2010
手伝う
てつだう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 help
The voicing landed one syllable late: not てづたう, but てつだう.
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
手伝ってよ。
Help me.
手伝おうか。
Can I help?
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.
- “Compound of 手 (te, “hand”) + 伝う (tsutau, “to go along something (intransitive); to move something along, to transmit something (transitive)”).”
- “The expected form of such a compound would be either てつたう (tetsutau), or てづたう (tezutau) with rendaku. The actual attested form of てつだう (tetsudau) suggests metathesis, with the voicing of rendaku shifting from the tsu to the following ta.”
- “First attested in the late 1500s in 狂言 (kyōgen, “popular plays”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 手伝う (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).
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).