First opened Sunday, September 11, 2011
心地
ここち
- 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).
feeling, sensation, mood
Kokochi is a sound shift from 心持ち (kokoromochi, “nature; feeling, mood”), and its kanji spelling is an ateji.
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.
In a sentence
穴があれば入りたい心地だ。
I wish I could sink through the floor.
僕は生きた心地がしなかった。
I felt like I was dead.
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.
- “/kokoro moti/ → /kokorʉmʉti/ → */kokomʉti/ → /kokot͡ɕi/”
- “Sound shift from 心持ち (kokoromochi, “nature; feeling, mood”).”
- “The kanji spelling is ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), borrowed from Chinese 心地 (xīndì).”
Source: Wiktionary: 心地 (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 心地 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ここち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しんじ・しんち
- “/siːm diː/ → /simdi/ → /ɕimd͡ʑi/ → /ɕiɲd͡ʑi/”
- “From Middle Chinese 心地 (MC sim dijH).”
What the labels mean
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.