First opened Friday, December 14, 2007
命
いのち
- 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).
life
Inochi is probably 息 (i, “breath”) plus の (no) plus 霊 (chi, “spirit, force, soul”).
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 命
In a sentence
命あっての物種。
While there is life, there is hope.
彼の命が心配だ。
I'm afraid for his life.
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *inəti. Probably a compound of Old Japanese elements 息 (i, “breath”, i in compounds, iki on its own) + の (no, possessive particle) + 霊 (chi, “spirit, force, soul”).”
- “Some analyses describe this as a compound using 生 (i, “life, breath”, i in compounds, iki on its own) as the initial semantic element. This is equally valid, as 息 (iki) and 生き (iki) are cognates.”
Source: Wiktionary: 命 (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 命 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いのち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みこと
- “From Old Japanese. Compound of 御 (mi-, honorific prefix) + 言 (koto, “word”). The mi prefix is generally limited to extremely high-status contexts such as gods or emperors.”
みこと
- “From Old Japanese. Originally a compound of 御 (mi-, honorific prefix) + 事 (koto, “abstract thing”, as opposed to 物, mono, “concrete thing”).”
めい
- “From Middle Chinese 命 (mjængᴴ, “command”). Compare modern Mandarin 命 (mìng, “life, destiny, instruction”).”
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.