First opened Thursday, August 19, 2010
国
くに
- 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).
country; place of origin
Kuni appears in the Kojiki of 712, and is perhaps related to Middle Chinese 郡 (“commandery”).
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 国
In a sentence
その国は消滅した。
The nation ceased to exist.
彼は金で国を売った。
He sold his country for money.
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Appears in the Kojiki of 712, the Nihon Shoki completed in 720, and the Man'yōshū completed some time after 759. Perhaps related to Middle Chinese 郡 (MC gjunH, “geographic region: commandery, prefecture”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 国 (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 国 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くに. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こく
- “From Middle Chinese 國 (MC kwok, “country, nation”).”
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.