First opened Wednesday, February 10, 2010
手紙
てがみ
- 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).
letter
Hand + paper gives “letter” in Japanese, but the identical characters in Chinese are an unrelated false friend.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
手紙書いてね。
Write me sometime, OK?
手紙を下さい。
Let me hear from you.
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”) + 紙 (kami, “paper”). The kami changes to gami as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “An etymologically unrelated false friend of Chinese 手紙 /手纸 (shǒuzhǐ).”
Source: Wiktionary: 手紙 (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 手紙 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not てがみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
てがん
- “/teɡami/ → /teɡaɴ/”
- “Shift from standard Japanese tegami, dropping the final vowel and keeping the nasal.”
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).