First opened Thursday, August 2, 2007
四
よん
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
four
Yon is a shift from yo, influenced by analogy with the final sound of the preceding number 三 (san, “three”).
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 四
In a sentence
富士山には四回登ったよ。
I've climbed Mt. Fuji four times.
十から四を引けば六が残る。
If you take four from ten, you have six.
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.
- “Shift from yo above, influenced by analogy by the final sound of preceding number 三 (san, “three”). The most common form as a stand-alone number.”
Source: Wiktionary: 四 (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 四 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not よん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
よ
- “⟨yo₂⟩ → */jə/ → /jo/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *yə.”
- “In modern Japanese, Japonic よ (yo) is more common than Sinitic し (shi, see Etymology 3) outside fixed compounds, which is similar to 七(なな) (nana) but different from other numerals. The reason may be a superstitious connection to 死(し) (shi, “death”), or simply avoiding confusion with similar sounding 一(いち) (ichi, “one”) and 七(しち) (shichi, “seven”).”
し
- “/si/ → /ɕi/”
- “From Middle Chinese 四 (MC siɪᴴ).”
- “Compare modern Hakka 四 (si).”
すう
- “From Mandarin 四 (sì).”
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.