宝

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 宝

In a sentence

• 子供(こども)は私(わたし)の宝(たから)です。

  My children are my treasures.

  Tatoeba #168536, translation #245955

• 子(こ)に過(す)ぎたる宝(たから)なし。

  There is no treasure more precious than a child.

  Tatoeba #168850, translation #245640

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.

• “From Old Japanese. First cited to the Man'yōshū of 759 CE. From Proto-Japonic *takara.”
• “Samuel Martin analyzes this as a compound of 高(たか) (taka-, “high”) + 等(ら) (-ra, pluralizing suffix). However, this is semantically problematic, as such a compound would ordinarily refer to “the heights” as a location, and there is no clear means of deriving the sense of “treasure” from the proposed component parts.”
• “Some sources derive this as a compound of 田(た) (ta, “paddy field”) + から (kara, “from”), literally “from the paddy fields”, from the way people value thriving paddy fields as a unique kind of treasure. However, the sense of “from” for から (kara) does not appear until roughly the Heian period, more recent than the first appearance of takara, making this a folk etymology.”

Source: Wiktionary: 宝 (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.

Compound

Two or more words or stems joined into one.

Derivation

A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.