First opened Friday, September 2, 2005
蚊
か
- 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).
mosquito
Ka, “mosquito”, may be related to 噛む (kamu, “to bite”) or 痒い (kayui, “itchy”), but the ultimate derivation remains 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 蚊
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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. Possibly related to 噛む (kamu, “to bite”) or 痒い (kayui, “itchy”), although the ultimate derivation remains unknown.”
Source: Wiktionary: 蚊 (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 蚊 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not か. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かあ
- “Cognate with 蚊 (ka). Likely pronounced long due to being a single mora. Elongation of single mora words is still seen in the Ōsaka dialect with words like teː "hand" from te. The 794 quotation is the oldest extant example of a long vowel in Japanese.”
ぶん
- “From Middle Chinese 蚊 (MC mjun).”
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.