First opened Wednesday, March 28, 2012
鳥居
とりい
- 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).
Shinto shrine archway
Torii is 鳥 (tori, “bird”) plus 居 (i, “abode”), from old legends of birds sitting on tree branches, and is first cited to a text from 922 CE.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
鳥居と言うと、階段を上がったところにあった赤いオブジェ？
By 'Torii' you mean that red objet d'art at the top of the steps?
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.
- “Compound of 鳥 (tori, “bird”) + 居 (i, “abode”). From old legends about birds possessed by kami and sitting on tree branches.”
- “First cited to a text from 922 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 鳥居 (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.