First opened Thursday, December 13, 2012
杖
つえ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
cane
Tsue is from Old Japanese and is found in the Man'yōshū.
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 杖
In a sentence
転ばぬ先の杖。
Forewarned is forearmed.
老人は杖をついていた。
The old man walked with a stick.
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.
- “⟨tuwe⟩ → /tuwe/ → /t͡suwe/ → /t͡suje/ → /t͡sue/”
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 杖 (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).
Other readings of 杖 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not つえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
じょう
- “From Middle Chinese 杖 (MC drjangX).”
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.