First opened Sunday, February 13, 2011
過ぎる
すぎる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
to exceed, to go beyond
Sugiru is likely cognate with 直ぐ (sugu, “straight; soon”), and first attested in the Kojiki of 712.
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 過
In a sentence
難しすぎる。
It's too difficult.
夏は過ぎた。
The summer is over.
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 過ぐ (sugu). First attested in the Kojiki of 712.”
- Hedged“Likely cognate with 挿(す)げる (sugeru, “to pass a hole through something”), 直(す)ぐ (sugu, “straight; soon”, adverb).”
- “Reconstructed as deriving from Proto-Japonic *sunk-oi-.”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 上(かみ)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami nidan katsuyō, “upper bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 上(かみ)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -iru.”
Source: Wiktionary: 過ぎる (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.