First opened Wednesday, May 9, 2007
末
すえ
- 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).
the end of, powder
Sue 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 末
In a sentence
夏の末と秋には紅葉が見られる。
In late summer and autumn one can see the leaves change colour.
彼はデッドヒートの末そのレースに勝った。
He won a narrow victory in the race.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712.”
Source: Wiktionary: 末 (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 末 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not すえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
うら・うれ
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Man'yōshū completed in 759.”
まつ
- “From Middle Chinese 末 (MC mat).”
- “First attested in Japanese in 1120.”
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.