First opened Tuesday, October 4, 2011
且つ
かつ
- 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).
yet, and
Katsu has a Heian accent that implies it is the conclusive form of 勝つ (katsu, “to win”), and it is possibly related to 片 (kata, “one of a pair”).
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 且
In a sentence
彼は詩人であり、かつ小説家だ。
He is a poet and novelist.
彼は作家でもあり、かつまた政治家でもある。
He is a writer and a statesman.
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“Its Heian Kyoto accent pattern LF implies this is the same as 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “conclusive form”) of the verb 勝(か)つ (katsu, “to win”), which has low tone L-. Note the existence of Classical Japanese かつ (katsu, “to be bearable”), homophone of its classical potential form which might have the sense "capable of opposing". Possibly related to 片(かた) (kata, “one of a pair”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 且つ (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).
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.