桐

Meaning: “paulownia”

From Old Japanese. The tree may have been imported from China prior to the Nara period. The term might be from 切り (kiri, “cutting”), from the way that the tree is quick to send out shoots after being cut. Some sources also speculate that this might be from some term 木理 (*kiri, “wood grain”) in reference to the desirable grain of this wood. However, 木理 is only attested with the reading mokuri, not kiri; also, the term is not attested until the 1830s, before which the Japanese terms for wood grain were 木目 (mokume, from the mid-1500s) or 木目 (kime, from the 1200s).