First opened Wednesday, September 22, 2010
箸
はし
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
chopsticks
Hashi is tentatively traced to Proto-Japonic *pasui, and probably related to 挟む (hasamu, “to pinch”).
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 箸
In a sentence
その少年は箸で食べてみた。
The boy tried eating with chopsticks.
ルーシーは箸が使えないんだ。
Lucy cannot use chopsticks.
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, tentatively traced to Proto-Japonic *pasui (compare Ainu パスイ (pasui)). Probably related to 挟む (hasamu, “to pinch, to scissor, to hold between”), possibly also related to 嘴 (“beak”, pitch accent hàshí) or 端 (“tip”, pitch accent háꜜshì).”
Source: Wiktionary: 箸 (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).
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.