First opened Wednesday, June 9, 2010
形
かたち
- 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).
shape
Katachi is 形 (kata, “shape, form”) plus ち (-chi), but the chi element's derivation is unclear.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 形
In a sentence
林檎の形は丸い。
An apple is round in shape.
色や形が識別できる。
He identifies colors and shapes.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
- Hedged“Probably related to 堅い / 硬い / 固い (katai, “hard”).”
- Hedged“Compound of 形 (kata, “shape, form”) + ち (-chi), but the derivation of the chi element is unclear.”
Source: Wiktionary: 形 (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 形 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かたち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
がた・がだ
- “Derived from kata above. The kata changes to gata as an instance of rendaku (連濁). Found most commonly as a suffixing element in compounds.”
- “The standalone noun sense was originally a shortening of 女形 (onnagata, literally “woman form”), a female role played by a male actor in kabuki theater. This noun sense is only spelled with the 形 kanji.”
けい
- “From Middle Chinese 形 (MC heng). Compare modern Mandarin 形 (xíng). The 漢音(かんおん) (kan'on) reading, so likely a later borrowing.”
なり
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
- “From 成り (nari), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of the verb 成る (naru, “to become”).”
- “First attested as a suffix on a noun in the 曾我物語 (Soga Mongatari), of uncertain dating but probably in the late 1300s. As a suffix on a verb stem, first attested from 1927.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.