First opened Friday, December 8, 2006
音
ね
- 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).
sound, note
Ne originally meant a sound or cry made by an insect, bird or beast, and is first attested in the Kojiki of 712.
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 音
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.
- “⟨ne₂⟩ → */nəɨ/ → /ne/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712, with the phonetic spelling 泥.”
- Hedged“The original meaning appears to have been "a sound or cry, as made by an insect, bird, or beast", likely related to the verb for making such a sound, 鳴く (naku, “to make a sound; to cry out”), as well as its doublet 泣く (naku, “to cry, to weep”). It is also likely related to 鳴る (naru, “to sound; to ring”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 音 (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 音 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ね. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おん
- “*/ʔiəm/ → /əmʉ/ → /omʉ/ → /oɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 音 (MC 'im).”
おと・おっと
- “⟨oto₂⟩ → */otə/ → /oto/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *ətə.”
- “Appears in the late 1400s with the geminate pronunciation /otto/. This reading is very rare, and appears to have fallen out of use.”
と
- “⟨to₂⟩ → */tə/ → /to/”
- “Apheresis of 音(おと) (oto) above.”
- “The drop is likely due to lexicalization of compound terms (such as with the possessive particle の (no)), which would necessitate contraction of /CV oto/ to /CVto/ (e.g. no oto → noto) due to Old Japanese rules against vowel hiatus. This contracted form could have then been reanalyzed as a distinct form of the word.”
いん
- “From Middle Chinese 音 (MC 'im).”
- “The kan'on pronunciation, so likely a later borrowing.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.