First opened Thursday, April 18, 2013
獣
けだもの
- 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).
beast, brute
Kedamono is literally “thing of hair”: 毛 (ke, “hair”) plus だ (da, genitive marker) plus 物 (mono, “thing”).
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 獣
In a sentence
原始人はどう猛な獣を見ておびえた。
The primitive man was frightened at the sight of a savage beast.
ライオンが獣の王であるのと同様、鷲は鳥の王である。
As the lion is king of beasts, so is the eagle king of birds.
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.
- “Literally "thing of hair". Compound of 毛 (ke, “hair”) + だ (da, genitive marker) + 物 (mono, “thing”). Medial -da- is a very rare genitive marker found in compounds, also seen in 果物 (kudamono, “fruit”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 獣 (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 獣 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not けだもの. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
けもの
- “Literally "hair thing". Compound of 毛 (ke, “hair”) + 物 (mono, “thing”).”
しし
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Proto-Japonic *sisi. Cognate with 肉 (shishi, “meat of a beast”).”
じゅう
- “/siu/ → /ɕiu/ → /d͡ʑiu/ → /d͡ʑuː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 獸 /兽 (syuwᴴ, “(wild) animal”). Compare modern Mandarin reading shòu, Min Nan siù.”
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.