First opened Wednesday, April 13, 2011
寺
てら
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
Buddhist temple
Tera appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE; some sources derive it from an ancestor of Middle Korean 졀 (jeol), likely Baekje.
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 寺
In a sentence
寺の隣に鬼が住む。
The devil lurks behind the cross.
その寺にも行ったよ。
We also went to the temple.
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. Appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, and in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
- Hedged“There are various theories regarding the ultimate derivation.”
- Hedged“* Some sources derive Japanese tera from an ancestor of Middle Korean 졀 (jeol) (likely Baekje). This is from earlier 뎔 (dyeol, “temple”) and is the nativised reading of 찰 (刹, chal, “Buddhist temple”) below, deriving in turn from Middle Chinese 剎 (MC tsrhaet), shortened from 剎多羅 (MC tsrhaet ta la, “Buddhist monastery, temple or shrine”), borrowed from Sanskrit क्षेत्र (kṣetra, “land, area, domain”), from Proto-Indo-Aryan *ṭṣáytram, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *ćšáytram, from Proto-Indo-European *tḱéytrom.”
- “* Other sources describe Japanese tera as cognate with modern Korean 찰 (刹, chal, “temple”), appearing as a component in terms such as 선찰 (禪刹, seonchal, “Zen temple”), 사찰 (寺刹, sachal, “Buddhist temple”).”
- “* Another derivation is given as Pali thera (“elders”) in reference to the monks.”
- Hedged“Considering the phonetic development in Korean, the avenues for transmission of Buddhist terms to Japan, and the consistent temple sense of the Japanese term throughout recorded history, the now-obsolete Korean 뎔 (dyeol, “temple”) may be a more likely source than Pali thera (“elders”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 寺 (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 寺 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not てら. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じ
- “From Middle Chinese 寺 (MC ziH).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.