First opened Wednesday, November 8, 2006
胸
むね
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
breast, chest
Mune is from Proto-Japonic *munai, with the same apophony as 神 (kamu, kami).
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 胸
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *munai. The apophony is similar to the phonetic process observed in the shift from 神 (kamu, “spirit, god”, older form used in compounds) to 神 (kami, newer form, used as a standalone noun); see WT:AJPX#Standalone forms and combining forms.”
- Hedged“Alternatively, may be a compound of 身 (mu, “body”) + 根 (ne, “root”). Other theories have been suggested.”
- “The first edition of the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten says that this is cognate with 棟 (mune, “main roofline, roof ridge”) and 宗, 旨 (mune, “gist, main idea, primary part”), from the underlying idea of central or main portion. However, the accent of 胸 (mune) in the Heian period is HL, while the accent of 棟 (mune) is HH. This suggests that they may not be directly related.”
- Hedged“Notably, 棟 and 宗 also have an older reading muna that is only used in compounds (for 宗, possibly only in place names). Meanwhile, 旨 (mune) (Heian HH) appears in The Tale of Genji of circa 1001-1004, and this reading is used as a standalone noun rather than in compounds. This is consistent with other nouns that have paired vowel forms, and suggests that muna is probably the original form, and that the compound derivation is a folk etymology.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 胸 (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 胸 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not むね. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
むな
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. Possibly the original form of mune below.”
- “The first edition of the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten says that this is cognate with 棟 (muna, “main roofline, roof ridge”), from the underlying idea of central or main portion. However, see Etymology 2.”
- “Possibly also related with 空, 虚 (muna, “emptiness, void”), from the idea of cavity.”
- “Seldom used in isolation even in Old Japanese. Only found as the first element of compounds in modern Japanese.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.