First opened Tuesday, March 18, 2008
尾
お
- 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).
tail, ridge
O, “tail”, was wo in Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE in the senses “tail” and “foot of a mountain”.
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 尾
In a sentence
犬は盛んに尾を振った。
The dog wagged its tail eagerly.
魚は尾を動かして泳ぐ。
A fish swims by moving its tail.
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.
- “/wo/ → /o/”
- “From Old Japanese 尾 (wo), from Proto-Japonic *bo.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE in the senses “tail” and “foot of a mountain”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 尾 (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 尾 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not お. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
び
- “From Middle Chinese 尾 (MC mj+jX).”
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.