First opened Tuesday, May 17, 2011
自首
じしゅ
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
surrender, give oneself up
Jishu is from Middle Chinese 自首, literally “self + report to the authorities; plead guilty”, first mentioned in the Ritsuryō legal code of 718 CE.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
その犯人は警察に自首した。
The criminal gave himself up to the police.
彼は警察に自首したそうです。
I heard that he gave himself up to the police.
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.
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 自首 (MC dzijH syuwH, literally “self + report to the authorities; plead guilty”). Borrowed into Old Japanese, where its first mention is in the Ritsuryō legal code of 718 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 自首 (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.