First opened Saturday, November 11, 2006
墓
はか
- 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).
grave, tomb
Haka has no known origin; the final ka may be 処 (-ka, suffix denoting place), as in 住み処 (sumika).
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 墓
In a sentence
彼を墓に埋めた。
They buried him in his grave.
彼らは墓を掘った。
They dug a grave.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *paka. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation unknown. One possibility is that the final ka may be 処(か) (-ka, suffix denoting place), as in the term 住(す)み処(か) (sumika, “dwelling, home, abode”, literally “living place”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 墓 (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 墓 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はか. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぼ
- “From Middle Chinese 墓 (MC muH). Compare modern Min Nan readings bō͘, bōng.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.