First opened Monday, July 23, 2007
小鳥
ことり
- 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).
small bird
Kotori is 小 (ko-, “little”) plus 鳥 (tori, “bird”), first attested in the late 900s in the Utsubo Monogatari.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は小鳥を狙った。
He aimed at the bird.
猫は小鳥に忍び寄った。
The cat crept toward the bird.
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.
- “Compound of 小(こ) (ko-, “little”) + 鳥(とり) (tori, “bird”).”
- “First attested in the late 900s, in the Utsubo Monogatari.”
Source: Wiktionary: 小鳥 (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.