First opened Wednesday, March 8, 2006
巣
す
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
- 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).
nest, breeding place
Su, “nest”, is found in the Kojiki of 712, from Proto-Japonic *su.
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 巣
In a sentence
蜘蛛は巣を張る。
A spider weaves a web.
鳥は木に巣を作る。
Birds make their nests in trees.
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. Found in the Kojiki of 712, and included in the Man'yōshū with the phonetic man'yōgana spelling 須 (su). In turn, from Proto-Japonic *su.”
Source: Wiktionary: 巣 (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.