First opened Wednesday, September 14, 2011
器
うつわ
- 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).
bowl, vessel, container
Utsuwa is from Old Japanese, cognate with 空 (utsuo), and appears to be 内 (utsu, “hollow”) plus は, though the は is unclear.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 器
In a sentence
彼は将来国家の棟梁たるべき器だ。
He has the capacity to be a future leader of the nation.
いくら器だけを日本一にしても、中身が三流やったらな～んの意味もないんちゃうの？
The container may be the best in Japan, but if the contents are third class, then isn't it completely meaningless?
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.
- “/ut͡supa/ → /ut͡suɸa/ → /ut͡suwa/”
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Cognate with 空 (utsuo, ancient utsupo, utsubo), signifying a hollowness. Appears to be a compound of 空, 内 (utsu, “hollow”, combining form, standalone form uchi, “inside”) + は (ha). The derivation of this ha element is unclear.”
Source: Wiktionary: 器 (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 器 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うつわ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
き
- “From Middle Chinese 器 (khijᴴ, “vessel; instrument”).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.