First opened Monday, May 8, 2006
光
ひかり
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
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).
light
Hikari is the nominalized stem of the verb 光る (hikaru, “to shine, to glitter, to gleam”).
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 光
In a sentence
光は闇を貫く。
The light penetrates the darkness.
月の光が弱い。
The light from the moon is weak.
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.
- “⟨pi₁kari⟩ → */pʲikari/ → /ɸikari/ → /hikari/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Nominalization of the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 光(ひか)る (hikaru, “to shine, to glitter, to gleam”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 光 (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 光 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひかり. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひかる
- “Nominalization of the verb 光(ひか)る (hikaru, “to shine, to glitter, to gleam”).”
こう
- “/kʷau/ → /kʷɔː/ → /kɔː/ → /koː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 光 (MC kwang).”
- “Compare modern Mandarin 光 (guāng), Hakka 光 (kông), and Min Nan 光 (kong).”
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.