First opened Monday, August 8, 2011
唾
つば
- 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).
saliva, spit, sputum
Tsuba appears to be a shortening of tsubaki, or perhaps a fusion of tsu with the particle は.
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 唾
In a sentence
つばを吐き出してください。
Please spit.
つばをはいた罰金は５ポンドです。
The penalty for spitting is five pounds.
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.
- Hedged“Appears to be a shortening of tsubaki above. Alternatively, may be a fusion of tsu below with particle は (wa, originally pa in Old Japanese, combining in some cases as ba).”
Source: Wiktionary: 唾 (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 唾 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つば. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
つばき
- “Derived as the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of now-obsolete verb 唾吐く (tsubaku, “to spit, to expectorate”), itself from 唾 (tsu, “saliva”) + 吐く (haku, “to expel from the mouth: to spit, to vomit, to exhale”).”
つ
- “Appears to be the oldest form. Possibly onomatopoeia.”
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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.