First opened Friday, October 12, 2007
梅
うめ
- 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).
plum, lowest (of a three-tier ranking system)
Ume is probably ultimately from Middle Chinese 梅, and was often spelled む (mume) from the Heian period.
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 梅
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “⟨me₂⟩ → */mːəɨ/ → *⟨mume₂⟩ → ⟨ume₂⟩ → */uməɨ/ → /ume/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“Probably ultimately from Middle Chinese 梅 (MC mwoj), with the borrowed me reading gaining a pronounced kind of initial m- sound, perhaps realized as *mme. The phonetic spelling was often rendered as むめ (*mme, mume) from the Heian period, with *mme/mume and ume apparently existing in free variation. The reading eventually settled on うめ (ume). Compare the similar pattern of phonetic shift for 馬 (ma → *mma → muma → uma, “horse”), likely from Middle Chinese 馬 (MC maeX).”
Source: Wiktionary: 梅 (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 梅 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うめ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
むめ
- “⟨me₂⟩ → */mːəɨ/ → *⟨mume₂⟩ → /mume/”
- “Possibly from Old Japanese.”
- “This reading becomes common during the Heian period, later falling into disuse.”
- “Superseded by the ume reading above.”
ばい
- “From a later borrowing of Middle Chinese 梅 (MC mwoj).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.