First opened Monday, November 27, 2006
砂
すな
- 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).
sand
Suna is attested in the Myōgoki (1275), and one theory shortens it from 砂子 (sunago).
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 砂
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.
- Hedged“Attested in the Myōgoki (1275). According to one theory, the word is shortened from earlier attested 砂子 (sunago, “sand”); see there for more.”
Source: Wiktionary: 砂 (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 砂 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not すな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いさご
- “Attested in the Nihon Shoki (720). Some sources connect the initial isa- element to 石 (ishi, “stone”).”
す
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Kojiki (712) in the name of the deity 須比智邇神 (supi₁di ni NO₂ KAMI₂, literally “god of the mud soil”). In most cases, the word has been conflated with 洲 (su, “sandbar”), which could be a cognate.”
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.