First opened Thursday, June 10, 2010
車
くるま
- 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).
car, vehicle
Kuruma is attested in phonetic spelling as 久流末 (kuruma), and may originally have meant “wheel”.
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 車
In a sentence
彼は車で来た。
He came by car.
彼は車を止めた。
He stopped the car.
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. Appears in the Man'yōshū completed some time after 759 CE, with the ideographic spelling 車. Also attested in the 正倉院文書 (Shōsō-in Bunsho) set of documents dated to the Nara period, appearing in the phonetic (man'yōgana) spelling of 久流末 (kuruma).”
- Hedged“Assuming an initial meaning of wheel, may be a compound of くる (kuru, related to spinning or rotating, as in 繰る (kuru, “to spin (as in thread)”), 枢 (kuru, “hinge”), くるくる (kurukuru, “spinningly, round and round”), 転めく (kurumeku, “to spin round and round, to rotate; to be dizzy”)) + ま (ma, a suffix added to various parts of speech to form an indeclinable word indicating state).”
Source: Wiktionary: 車 (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 車 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くるま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しゃ
- “From Middle Chinese 車 (MC tsyhae).”
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.