First opened Tuesday, August 9, 2011
草
くさ
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
grass
Kusa, “grass”, is from Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kusa, and is found in the Man'yōshū.
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 草
In a sentence
羊は草を食べる。
Sheep feed on grass.
私は草の上に寝た。
I laid myself on the grass.
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“From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kusa. Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE. Possibly cognate with Korean 꽃 (kkot, “flower”).”
- Hedged“The development of the fake, amateur senses is unclear, but probably from an earlier meaning green, referring to the color of the grass.”
- “From the resemblance of multiple repetitions of w (w, “LOL”) to grass: wwwwwwwww.”
- Hedged“Possibly influenced by the term くすくす (kusukusu), an adverb indicating stifled laughter.”
Source: Wiktionary: 草 (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 草 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not くさ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
そう
- “/sau/ → /sɔː/ → /soː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 草 (MC tshawX).”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.