First opened Wednesday, November 30, 2011
理屈
りくつ
- 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).
theory, reason
In rikutsu, 屈 is a daiyōji replacing 窟, and the source traces it to Liu Yiqing's A New Account of the Tales of the World.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
それは理屈に合わない。
It is contrary to reason.
これは理屈で割り切れない。
This is above reason.
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.
- “屈 is a daiyōji replacing 窟.”
- “Originally from Chapter 4. Letters and Scholarship, A New Account of the Tales of the World by Liu Yiqing (南朝 宋，劉義慶，《世說新語·文學》).”
Source: Wiktionary: 理屈 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.