ガッツ

1893 is an English checkpoint for guts as courage: the Online Etymology Dictionary records that figurative plural sense for English gut. Older gut meant the intestine, and dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster still list bowels, digestive tract, and courage under the same headword. Japanese ガッツ is a borrowing of the plural English form guts, written with small ッ to match the clipped stop in Japanese pronunciation. Postwar Japanese sports writing made ガッツ a word of effort, stamina, and 根性. Kotobank's Digital Daijisen defines it as the will to keep trying, and Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten gives 気力 and 根性. Related forms include ガッツポーズ, which is linked to the 1972 bowling magazine Shukan Guts Bowl and became widely known after Guts Ishimatsu's 1974 WBC lightweight win in Tokyo. Modern ガッツ appears in school clubs, baseball broadcasts, manga, and workplace talk. English guts can still mean actual insides, as in fish guts, or bravery in a sentence such as It takes guts. Japanese ガッツ almost never means internal organs in daily speech; ガッツがある人 means someone with push and persistence. It appears near ファイト and 闘志.