First opened Wednesday, June 22, 2005
後
のち
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
afterwards, since then
Nochi is from Old Japanese, and its ultimate derivation is unknown.
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 後
In a sentence
晴れ後曇りでした。
It was sunny, then cloudy.
法案は激しい論争ののち議会を通過した。
The bill was passed after a hard fight in the House.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Ultimate derivation unknown.”
Source: Wiktionary: 後 (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 後 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not のち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あと
- “Originally an extension of 跡(あと) (ato, “footprint; leftover”), itself a compound of 足(あ) (a, “foot”) + 所(と) (to, “place”).”
しりえ
- “/siripe/ → /çirife/ → /çirie/”
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Nihon Shoki of 720, and phonetically as 志利弊 (siripe₁) in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
- “Compound of 尻 (shiri, “butt, tail, rear”) + 方 (e, “side, facing, way, direction”).”
ゆり
- “From Old Japanese. Ultimate derivation unknown. May be cognate with より (yori, “from; after”).”
ご
- “From Middle Chinese 後 (huwX, huwH, “after”).”
こう
- “From Middle Chinese 後 (huwX, “after”). Classified as the kan'on, so likely a later borrowing. Compare modern Mandarin reading hòu.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.