First opened Monday, August 21, 2006
円
えん
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
circle, yen
En began as wen, from Middle Chinese 圓 (“circle”); the yen sense came in the Meiji period from 銀圓 (yínyuán), “round silver object(s)”.
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 円
In a sentence
５０円です。
It's 50 yen.
円を描いてくれ。
Draw a circle.
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.
- “/wen/ → /eɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 圓 (MC hjwen), with the original sense of "circle, roundness".”
- “The yen sense came much later in the Meiji period, from Chinese 圓 /圆 (yuán), itself from 銀圓 /银圆 (yínyuán, “round silver object(s), especially a piece of eight”). Compare Chinese 元 (yuán, “yuan”) and Korean 원 (won, “Korean won”). Doublet of 元 (gen, “yuan (Chinese currency)”), ユアン (yuan, “yuan (Chinese currency)”), and ウォン (won, “won (Korean currency)”).”
- “The yen became the official currency of Japan in 1871, succeeding the 両(りょう) (ryō) and the 文(もん) (mon).”
Source: Wiktionary: 円 (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 円 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not えん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
のどか・つぶら・つむら・まろし
- “Various nanori readings.”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.