First opened Sunday, May 29, 2011
嘴
くちばし
- 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).
beak, bill
Kuchibashi is 口 (kuchi, “mouth”) plus 端 (hashi, “tip; edge”), with hashi voiced to bashi by rendaku.
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 嘴
In a sentence
きつつきは、長く尖ったくちばしで、木の幹をつついて、中にいる虫を食べます。
Woodpeckers peck tree trunks with their long pointed beaks and eat insects found there.
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.
- “Originally from 口(くち) (kuchi, “mouth”) + 端(はし) (hashi, “tip; edge”). The hashi changes to bashi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “First attested around 850 CE.”
- “The kanji is composed of 口(くち) (kuchi) and 觜(はし) (hashi, “beak; bill”). See also Etymology 2.”
Source: Wiktionary: 嘴 (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 嘴 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くちばし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
はし
- “Cognate with 端(はし) (hashi, “edge; tip”).”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).