First opened Monday, November 20, 2006
法
ほう
- 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).
Act (law: the X Act)
Hō was once はふ (fafu) in kan'on and ほふ (fofu) in goon, reportedly used in general and Buddhist senses respectively.
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 法
In a sentence
すべての人は法の前に平等です。
Everybody is equal before the law.
これは生物の学習法としてはあまりよくないと思う。
I don't think this is a good approach to biology.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 法 (MC pjop). Originally, the kan'on was はふ (fafu), and the goon was ほふ (fofu), although both became ほう (hō) in modern Japanese. It is suggested that the kan'on was used in the general senses, while the goon was used in Buddhist contexts.”
Source: Wiktionary: 法 (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 法 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ほう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ふらん
- “From French franc.”
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.