First opened Friday, February 12, 2010
時計
とけい
- 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).
a watch; a clock
The spelling you know isn't the original, and the sources disagree about why it works.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
時計を盗まれた。
I had my watch stolen.
時計が止まった。
A clock stopped.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Middle Chinese 土圭 (tʰuo^X kwei, literally “earth, clay + stack of clay tablets”, a kind of sundial used in the Zhou Dynasty).”
- Hedged“The 土圭 spelling is the original form, with the kan'on reading of tokei. This has been largely superseded by the spelling 時計 in modern writing, which uses the 時 character as ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)). Probably this spelling from native Japanese word ときはかり(see below). Alternatively, the kanji spelling could be interpreted as jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), using the meanings of the characters as 時 (“time”) + 計 (“measurement”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 時計 (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 時計 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not とけい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ときはかり
- “Compound of 時(とき) (toki, “time”) + 計(はか)り (hakari, “measuring”, the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 計(はか)る (hakaru, “to measure”).).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.