First opened Saturday, October 29, 2005
夜
よ
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
evening, night
Yo was spelled with the phonetic 用 in the Kojiki of 712 CE, and has since taken on a more literary sense.
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 夜
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.
- “⟨yo₁⟩ → /jʷo/ → /jo/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *yo.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE with the phonetic spelling 用.”
- “In modern development, this term has taken on a more literary sense.”
Source: Wiktionary: 夜 (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 夜 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not よ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
よる
- “⟨yo₁ru⟩ → */jʷoru/ → /joru/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *yoru.”
- “Derived from yo below, suffixed with an element ru of unclear meaning. Compare 日(ひ) (hi, “day”) → 昼(ひる) (hiru, “daytime”), which seems to use this same ru element.”
- “Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE, with the phonetic spelling 用流.”
- “Now the most common term for night in modern Japanese.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.