First opened Sunday, February 26, 2012
尽くす
つくす
- 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).
to exhaust, to run out; to devote, to serve
Tsukusu is from Old Japanese, found in the Man'yōshū and spelled phonetically as 都久須.
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 尽
In a sentence
手は尽くした。
I have done everything I could do.
ベストを尽くせ。
Do your best.
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 Old Japanese [script needed] (tukusu). Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE, spelled phonetically in man'yōgana as 都久須.”
Source: Wiktionary: 尽くす (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.