First opened Sunday, February 21, 2010
果物
くだもの
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
fruit
Fruit is literally “tree's thing”, with a lost possessive hiding in the middle.
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
レモンはすっぱいくだものだ。
The lemon is a sour fruit.
どんなくだものがご入用ですか。
What kind of fruit do you want?
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.
- “Literally “tree's thing”. Originally a compound of 木 (ku, “tree”, irregular shift from ancient ko pronunciation) + だ (da, possessive marker between two nouns, only found in a few compounds) + 物 (mono, “thing”).”
- “The medial da is also seen in 獣 (kedamono, “beast”, literally “hairy thing”). The kanji is jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 果物 (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 果物 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くだもの. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かぶつ
- “/kwabut͡su/ → /kabut͡su/”
- “Possibly from Middle Chinese compound 果物 (*kuɑ *miuət, literally “fruit thing”). Compare modern Mandarin 果物 reading guǒwù (rare), Cantonese gwo² mat⁶ (rare).”
- “Rarely used in modern Japanese.”
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.