First opened Thursday, December 8, 2011
小切手
こぎって
- middle-high (nakadaka): 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).
cheque, check
Kogitte is 小 (ko-, “little”) plus 切手 (kitte, “postage stamp”), with kitte voiced to gitte by rendaku.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
小切手で支払う。
I will pay for it by check.
小切手は使えますか。
Will you take a personal check?
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.
- “From 小(こ) (ko-, “little”) + 切(きっ)手(て) (kitte, “postage stamp”).”
- “The kitte changes to gitte as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 小切手 (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).