First opened Monday, April 21, 2008
粉
こな
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
flour, powder
Kona appears to be 粉 (ko, “powder”) plus an unclear suffix な (-na), first cited to 1683.
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 粉
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.
- Hedged“Appears to be 粉 (ko, “powder”, see above) + な (-na, suffixing element, meaning unclear).”
- “First cited to 1683.”
Source: Wiktionary: 粉 (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 粉 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こ
- “⟨ko₁⟩ → */kwo/ → /ko/”
- “From Old Japanese. Used phonetically to spell ko in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.