First opened Friday, July 6, 2012
繕う
つくろう
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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 mend, to repair
Tsukurou is likely first attested in the Ruiju Myōgishō, from 作ら (tsukura), the irrealis of 作る (tsukuru, “to make”), plus ふ (fu).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 繕
In a sentence
私はこのドレスを絹糸で繕った。
I sewed the dress with silk thread.
猿たちは互いに毛繕いし合っている。
The monkeys are grooming each other.
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.
- “/tukura pu/ → /t͡sukurəfu/ → /t͡sukurofu/ → /t͡sukurou/”
- Hedged“Likely first attested in the Ruiju Myōgishō (c. 12th century).”
- Hedged“Derived from 作ら (tsukura), the 未然形 (mizenkei, “incomplete or irrealis form”) of verb 作る (tsukuru, “to make”) + ふ (fu, auxiliary verb representing ongoing or repetitive action). The medial /-ra-/ changed early on to /-ro-/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 繕う (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.