First opened Saturday, April 24, 2010
床
ゆか
- 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).
floor
Yuka meant “bed” in the Nihon Shoki, and a 1668 scholar derived it from “not going”.
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 床
In a sentence
床に伏せろ！
Get down!
床が崩壊した。
The floor gave way.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in the 日(に)本(ほん)書(しょ)紀(き) (Nihon Shoki), completed in 720 and one of the earliest works written in Japanese, with a meaning of “bed”.”
- “According to the 和(わ)句(く)解(げ) (Wakuge), published in 1668 by early Edo-period scholar 松(まつ)永(なが)貞(てい)徳(とく) (Matsunaga Teitoku), derives from 行(ゆ)か (yuka), the 未(み)然(ぜん)形(けい) (mizenkei, “irrealis form”) stem of the verb 行(ゆ)く (yuku, “to go”), of an original meaning similar to “not going”, in reference to a place where one sits down to rest.”
Source: Wiktionary: 床 (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 床 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ゆか. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
とこ
- “⟨to₂ko₂⟩ → /toko/”
- “From Old Japanese. Cognate with 所 (tokoro, “place”). Attested since at least the Nara period, appearing in the Man'yōshū, completed in 759.”
- “Possibly an ancient compound of ⟨to₁⟩ (Proto-Japonic *to (“place”), as in 跡 ⟨ato₁⟩, “footprint, track”, from “foot place, where one has stepped”) + ⟨ko₂⟩ (noun-forming suffixing element denoting “place”, as in ここ ⟨ko₂ko₂⟩, “here”, from “this place”).”
しょう
- “/ʑau/ → /ɕau/ → /ɕɔː/ → /ɕoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 床 (MC dzrjang). Devoicing apparently occurred after borrowing.”
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.