First opened Tuesday, June 13, 2006
羽
はね
- 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).
wing
Hane is 羽 (ha, “feather”) plus 根 (ne, “root”), originally the spot where a quill meets the skin.
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 羽
In a sentence
羽は鳥に固有のものだ。
Feathers are peculiar to birds.
その鳥は羽を震わせた。
The bird quivered its wings.
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.
- “Appears in the Wamyō Ruijushō of 938 CE.”
- “Compound of 羽(は) (ha, “feather”, see below) + 根(ね) (ne, “root”), originally referring specifically to where the quill of a feather attaches to the skin. Over time, the meaning broadened to refer to a feather, and from there, to refer to a wing.”
Source: Wiktionary: 羽 (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 羽 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はね. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
は・ば
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “May be cognate with 葉(は) (ha, “leaf”).”
う
- “From Middle Chinese 羽 (MC hjuX|hjuH).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.