First opened Thursday, July 21, 2005
縄
なわ
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
rope
Nawa, “rope”, derives from the verb 綯う (nau, “to plait or twist together into twine or line”).
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 縄
In a sentence
泥棒を見て縄をなう。
To braid the rope only after the thief is caught.
禍福は糾える縄の如し。
When an ill wind blows it does good to no one.
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, from Proto-Japonic *napa. Derived from verb 綯う (nau, “to plait or twist together into twine or line”). Possibly related to Korean 노 (no, “string, cord”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 縄 (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).
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.