First opened Tuesday, April 20, 2010
靴
くつ
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
shoes, footwear
Who borrowed from whom? Some Japanese sources say kutsu comes from Korean gudu; some Korean sources say the reverse.
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.
Written with 靴
In a sentence
靴を履いて。
Put on your shoes.
彼の靴は茶色だ。
His shoes are brown.
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.
- “⟨kutu⟩: */kutu/ → /kut͡su/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *kutu. Cognate with Yaeyama 草鞋 (futsï), Yonaguni 草鞋 (c'i).”
- “Found in the Man'yōshū poetry compilation, completed circa 759.”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation unclear. Some Japanese sources suggest a borrowing from or cognate with Korean 구두 (gudu, “shoes”), but then some Korean sources suggest that the Korean term was borrowed from Japanese 靴 (kutsu, “shoes”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 靴 (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.