First opened Sunday, December 1, 2024
腸
ちょう
- 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).
bowels, intestines
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 腸
In a sentence
腸の具合が悪い。
I have trouble with my bowels.
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.
- “/tyau/ → /tyoː/.”
Source: Wiktionary: 腸 (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 腸 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ちょう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
わた
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *wata.”
はらわた
- “* [parawata] → [ɸarawata] → [harawata]. Compound of 腹 (hara, “stomach”) + 腸 (wata, “intestines”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.