First opened Thursday, January 25, 2007
原
はら
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
field, plain
Hara, “field”, is compared with Middle Korean ᄇᆞᆯ (pól), whence modern 벌 (beol).
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 原
In a sentence
私達がよく野球をして遊んだ原は今すっかり家が建て込んでしまった。
The field where we used to play ball is now all built up.
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Found in the Man'yōshū, finished some time after 759 CE. Compare Middle Korean ᄇᆞᆯ〮 (pól, “field, plain”), whence modern 벌 (beol). Possibly from 原(はる) (haru) below, by vowel assimilation.”
Source: Wiktionary: 原 (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 原 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はら. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
げん
- “From Middle Chinese 原 (MC ngjwon, “source; origin; beginning”).”
はる・ばる
- “Possibly related to 原(はら) (hara) or Middle Korean ᄇᆞᆯ〮 (pól, “field, plain”), whence modern 벌 (beol). The proximity of Kyūshū (where this pronunciation is prevalent) to the Korean Peninsula may support the latter connection.”
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.