First opened Tuesday, April 4, 2006
子
こ
- 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).
child
Ko, “child”, is cognate with 蚕 (ko, “silkworm”) and possibly 小 (ko, “little”).
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 子
In a sentence
親は子を愛する。
Parents love their children.
親の心子知らず。
It is a wise father that knows his own child.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨ko₁⟩ → */kʷo/ → /ko/”
- “From Old Japanese, attested in the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE), two of the oldest examples of written Japanese.”
- Hedged“Cognate with 蚕 (ko, “silkworm”) and possibly 小 (ko, “little”, diminutive prefix).”
- Hedged“Possibly cognate with Goguryeo 仇 (*gu), which appears in an ancient place name with an apparent meaning of child.”
Source: Wiktionary: 子 (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 子 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
し・す
- “From Middle Chinese 子 (MC tsiX), also used in the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE) as 借音 (shakuon) kana for ⟨si⟩. Compare modern Mandarin 子 (zǐ).”
- “The goon reading of shi is likely the original borrowing:”
- “: /t͡sɨ/ → /sɨ/ → */ɕɨ/ → /ɕi/”
- “The tōon reading su appears later, and only shows up in certain set terms borrowed from Chinese, where it seems to serve as a kind of nominalizing suffix:”
- “: /t͡sɨ/ → /sɨ/ → */sʉ/ → /su/”
ね
- “Contracted from 鼠 (nezumi, “mouse, rat”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.