First opened Saturday, September 16, 2006
唇
くちびる
- 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).
lip
Kuchibiru, “lip”, may come from kuchiberi: 口 (kuchi, “mouth”) plus 縁 (heri, “edge”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 唇
In a sentence
私は唇を噛んだ。
I bit my lip.
冬は唇があれます。
In winter, our lips get chapped.
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“The くち (kuchi) element is 口(くち) (kuchi, “mouth”). Several dictionaries, such as Kōjien gloss the meaning of this overall term as 口縁(くちべり) (kuchiberi), consisting of 口(くち) (kuchi, “mouth”) + 縁(へり) (heri, “edge”). Therefore the current pronunciation kuchibiru may be a shift from an earlier kuchiberi. The h of heri now becomes a b in an instance of rendaku (連濁), but may not have in older Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 唇 (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).
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.