First opened Sunday, May 8, 2011
具体
ぐたい
- 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).
concrete, tangible, material
Gutai is Middle Chinese 具體, literally “arrange + body”, repurposed in 1881 as a translation of English concrete.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “Originally from Middle Chinese 具體 (MC gjuH thejX, literally “arrange + body”), used in Mencius's writings with a meaning close to the literal sense, the entirety is arranged, in order.”
- “Repurposed in the 1881 work 哲学字彙 (Tetsugaku Jii, “Dictionary of Philosophy”) by Inoue Tetsujirō as a translation of English concrete, as opposed to abstract.”
Source: Wiktionary: 具体 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.