着物

Taken apart

1. 着

   き

   to wear clothing

2. +

3. 物

   もの

   thing

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 着物

In a sentence

• なかなか「きもの」を着(き)る機会(きかい)がないというかたも、思(おも)い切(き)って着(き)てみましょう！

  Also, those of you who don't have the chance to wear a 'kimono', go for it and wear one!

  Tatoeba #75301, translation #328418

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 着(き) (ki, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 着(き)る (kiru, “to wear clothing”)) + 物(もの) (-mono, “thing”). Compare the similar formation of the word 食(た)べ物(もの) (tabemono, “food”, literally “eating thing”).”
• “First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE in the ideographic spelling 裳, later attested less ambiguously in the Utsubo Monogatari of the late 900s CE.”
• “As contact with the West grew, the sense shifted from referring generically to any clothing to referring specifically to 和服(わふく) (wafuku, “(traditional) Japanese clothing”), in particular kimono and other robe-like full-length garments (長着(ながぎ) (nagagi)), as opposed to Western apparel (洋服(ようふく) (yōfuku)).”

Source: Wiktionary: 着物 (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).

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.

Sound change

The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.

Meaning shift

The word's meaning moved away from where it started.