First opened Wednesday, May 23, 2007
噂
うわさ
- 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).
rumor, gossip
Uwasa originally referred to private conversation about one's social superiors, and is possibly from 上 (ufa, “up, upward”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 噂
In a sentence
人の噂も７５日。
It will be a nine-day's wonder.
彼は噂を否定した。
He denied the rumor.
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.
- “/ufasa/ → /uwasa/”
- “First attested in works from the Muromachi period.”
- Hedged“Considering that the meaning originally referred to private conversation about one's social superiors, possibly derived as a compound of 上 (ufa, “up, upward”, ancient reading of modern uwa, the combining form of modern ue; in reference to those of higher social standing) + さ (sa, “-ness”, suffix indicating state or degree).”
Source: Wiktionary: 噂 (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.