First opened Wednesday, April 28, 2010
月
つき
- 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).
moon
Tsuki was once tuki, and Wiktionary notes a vowel alternation between its standalone and combining forms.
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 月
In a sentence
月は昇った。
The moon is risen.
月が沈んだ。
The moon has set.
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.
- “⟨tuki₂⟩ → */tukɨ/ → */t͡sukɨ/ → /t͡suki/”
- “From Old Japanese 月 (tuki₂), ultimately from Proto-Japonic *tukui.”
- “For the vowel alternation, see WT:AJPX#Standalone forms and combining forms.”
Source: Wiktionary: 月 (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 月 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つき. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
がつ
- “/ɡʷatɨ/ → /ɡʷat͡su/ → /ɡat͡su/”
- “From Middle Chinese 月 (ŋʉɐt̚).”
げつ
- “/ɡʷetu/ → /ɡet͡su/”
- “From Middle Chinese 月 (ŋʉɐt̚).”
- “Compare modern Hakka 月 (ngie̍t), Min Nan 月 (ge̍h).”
がち
- “/ɡʷat͡ɕi/ → /ɡat͡ɕi/”
- “First attested in the Edo period.”
- “Appears to be a poetic use of the 呉(ご)音(おん) (goon, literally “Wu sound”) reading, in reference to a rank of 端(はし)女(じょ)郎(ろう) (hashi jorō, “low-end prostitute]”) in the Kansai region. According to a popular song, a 月(がち) (gachi, “moon”) prostitute cost one 匁(もんめ) (monme, old unit of currency, worth roughly 3.75 grams of silver), a 影(かげ) (kage, “shadow”) prostitute cost two monme, and a 汐(しお) (shio, “tide; loveliness”) prostitute cost three monme.”
がち
- “Either a shift in sense from the low-ranking prostitute meaning above, or a shift in pronunciation from 頑(がん)痴(ち) (ganchi, literally “stubborn and stupid”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.