First opened Sunday, February 26, 2006
管
かん
- 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).
pipe, tube
Kan, “pipe”, is from Middle Chinese 管, and the pipe sense is traced back to the writings of Zhuangzi.
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 管
In a sentence
管から水が吹き出した。
Water shot from the pipe.
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.
- “/kwan/ → /kan/”
- “From Middle Chinese 管 (kuɑn^X, “pipe, tube”).”
- “The pipe sense is traced back to the writings of Zhuangzi, already an influential text in Japan in the 700s.”
- “The brush handle sense is traced back to the text of the 詩経 (Shikyō, “Classic of Poetry”), an Old Chinese poetry anthology written from the 11th to 7th centuries BCE and already influencing Japanese writing since the mid-700s.”
- “The wind instrument sense is sourced from the 延喜式 (Engishiki) of 927.”
Source: Wiktionary: 管 (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 管 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
くだ
- “From Old Japanese 管 (kuda, “pipe, tube”).”
- “First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 and the Man'yōgana of 759 with the ideogrammatic spelling of 小角 (literally “small horn”).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.