First opened Tuesday, November 30, 2010
近く
ちかく
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
nearby; in the neighborhood
Chikaku is the noun use of the stem of classical 近し (chikashi, “near”), equivalent to modern 近い.
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 近
In a sentence
７時近くだ。
It is close to seven o'clock.
バス停は近くだ。
The bus stop is quite handy.
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.
- “Inherited from Old Japanese. The noun sense is a nominalization of the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of classical adjective 近(ちか)し (chikashi, “near”), equivalent to modern 近(ちか)い (chikai).”
Source: Wiktionary: 近く (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.