First opened Tuesday, June 19, 2007
骨
ほね
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
bone
Hone went from pone through ɸone to hone, from Proto-Japonic *pənay.
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 骨
In a sentence
骨が喉にささった。
The bone caught in my throat.
彼は犬に骨をやった。
He gave the dog a bone.
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.
- “/pone/ → /ɸone/ → /hone/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pənay.”
Source: Wiktionary: 骨 (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 骨 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ほね. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かわら
- “/kapara/ → /kaɸara/ → /kawara/”
- “Probably from Sanskrit कपाल (kapāla, “cup, bowl, skull”). Cognate with 瓦 (kawara, “tile, particularly for roofing or flooring”).”
こつ
- “From Middle Chinese 骨 (MC kwot, “bone”).”
- “The knack sense comes from the idea of the bones as the innermost core or essence of something.”
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.