First opened Tuesday, June 8, 2010
次
つぎ
- 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).
next, following
Tsugi is a nominalization of the stem of the verb 次ぐ (tsugu, “to follow, to be next; to connect”).
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 次
In a sentence
次は君の番だ。
It's your turn next.
次の方どうぞ。
Next person, please.
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.
- “Nominalization of the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of Old Japanese-derived verb 次ぐ (tsugu, “to be in a sequence; to follow, to continue from something, to be next; to connect, to join”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 次 (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 次 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つぎ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
し
- “From Middle Chinese 次 (MC tshijH, “in order; second”).”
- “Less common reading in modern Japanese. Superseded in most cases by ji; see below.”
じ
- “/si/ → /ʑi/ → /d͡ʑi/”
- “Sound shift from shi above.”
すき
- “Nominalization of the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of Old Japanese-derived verb 次く (suku, “to follow, to continue from something, to be next;”).”
- “The verb form was obsolete even in olden times. Existence of the verb, possibly related to tsugu mentioned above, is inferred from placenames found in the Man'yōshū and other ancient poetry.”
ついで
- “/tuɡite/ → /tuide/”
- “Sound shift from 次第 (tsugite, “order, sequence”), itself originally the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of now-obsolete Old Japanese-derived verb 継ぎつ (tsugitsu, “to do things in sequence, to establish an order”).”
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.