First opened Tuesday, August 10, 2010
力
ちから
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
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).
strength, power
Chikara is a compound of 霊 (chi, “power, life force, essence”) plus 柄 (kara, “source, origin”).
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 力
In a sentence
力が尽きた。
My strength is all gone.
力は正義なり。
Might is right.
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, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *tikara. Compound of Old Japanese elements 霊 (chi, “power, life force, essence”) + 柄 (kara, “source, origin”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 力 (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 力 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ちから. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
りき
- “From Middle Chinese 力 (lik). The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing. Compare modern Cantonese reading lik⁶.”
りょく
- “From Middle Chinese 力 (lì), but apparently from a different source dialect or at a different time than 力 (lik). The kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing. Compare reconstructed Middle Chinese reading /li̯ək/ or Korean reading ryeok.”
- “Only found in compounds and idioms in modern Japanese.”
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.