First opened Tuesday, March 5, 2013
畜生
ちくしょう
- 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).
beast, brute, damn
Chikushō is from Middle Chinese 畜生, literally “livestock + livestock; sacrificial animal”, itself influenced by Sanskrit.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
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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.
- “/tikusjau/ → /t͡ɕikusjoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 畜生 (MC trhjuwH sraeng, literally “livestock + livestock; sacrificial animal”), itself influenced by Sanskrit तिर्यञ्च् (tiryañc, “a beast; the organic world”) or Sanskrit तिर्यग्योनि (tiryagyoni, “animal creation”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 畜生 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.