First opened Saturday, March 3, 2007
あ
あ
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
Ah
A, “Ah”, is a common exclamatory sound made by people of various cultures around the world.
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.
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.
- “Common exclamatory sound made by people of various cultures around the world.”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *a. The short form of あれ (are).”
- “Fell into disuse in roughly the Heian period, when it was replaced by わ (wa).”
- “/ka/ → /a/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from か (ka). Appears from the Heian period.”
Source: Wiktionary: あ (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).
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.