First opened Saturday, August 5, 2006
平和
へいわ
- 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).
peace
Heiwa is a rearrangement of 和平 (wahei, “peace”), first attested in the Meiji era.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
ハトは平和のシンボルである。
The dove is a symbol of peace.
平和への道は決して平坦ではない。
The road to peace is never smooth.
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.
- Hedged“Rearrangement of 和平 (wahei, “peace”), likely that 平 (hei) also means "flat", therefore switching the kanji meant "calm, equal + harmony → peace".”
- “First attested in the Meiji era.”
Source: Wiktionary: 平和 (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 平和 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not へいわ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぴんふ・ぴんほう
- “Borrowed from Chinese 平和 (pínghú).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.