First opened Wednesday, February 21, 2007
文
ぶん
- 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).
sentence
Bun, “sentence”, is a later borrowing from Middle Chinese.
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 文
In a sentence
文は人なり。
The style is the man himself.
文は武に勝る。
The pen is mightier than the sword.
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.
- “A later borrowing from Middle Chinese. Compare modern Min Nan reading bûn, Hakka vûn.”
Source: Wiktionary: 文 (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 文 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ぶん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もん
- “From Middle Chinese 文 (mjun, “ornate; a kind of coin; language, literature, a letter, a character”).”
ふみ
- “Possibly a shift from an older Middle Chinese-derived reading pun. Earlier Japanese writing was ambiguous regarding the final n sound spelled ん in modern Japanese, with this sound often spelled (and possibly pronounced) as む (mu) instead.”
- “*/pumu/ → /pumi/ → /ɸumi/”
- “This reading appears in the Heian period, in works such as The Tale of Genji.”
あや
- “Uncertain. Appears in texts from the early Heian period. Compare Miyako あやぐ (ayagu), あーぐ (āgu).”
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.