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ryu

nounattested in dialogue

A Japanese school of a specific discipline, usually martial arts.

noun

  1. 1

    A Japanese school of a specific discipline, usually martial arts.

    When Nakanishi became the headmaster of his own ryu, in the later 1700s, he began looking for a way to make swordsmanship less hazardous, concentrating on the improvement of practice equipment.

    Dave notes that the only people capable of such precise destruction were bone-breakers from an ancient Japanese ryu.

    Numerous instructors have trained in a traditional Japanese ryu, but few have progressed to the oku level—they may not even be aware of the existence of such a thing.

    In today’s Japan, to receive this title, you must have the rank of godan or above in that ryu. Many people claim this title, but very few have actually received it from a traditional Japanese ryu.

Etymology

From Japanese 流(りゅう) (ryū), mainly an affix, used here in the sense of 流派(りゅうは) (ryūha).

Forms

plural
ryus
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).