First opened Friday, May 2, 2008
猿
さる
- 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).
monkey
Saru's ultimate derivation is possibly borrowed from Ainu サロ (saro, “monkey”).
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 猿
In a sentence
サルは木から落ちた。
The monkey came down.
そのサルは木に登った。
The monkey climbed up a tree.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation possibly borrowed from Ainu サロ (saro, “monkey”, from サㇻ (sar, “a tail”) + オ (o, “to bear, to wear, to carry”)).”
- “The kanji is from Chinese 猿 (yuán, “ape”). Compare Japanese 猪 (inoshishi, “boar”) from Chinese 猪 (zhū, “pig”) and Japanese 豚 (buta, “pig”) from Chinese 豚 (tún, “suckling pig”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 猿 (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 猿 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
まし
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE, used phonetically to spell the sound /masi/.”
- “Ultimate derivation unknown.”
ましら
- “Derived from earlier mashi form above. Found in texts from the early 1900s, possibly earlier. Appears to be mashi + the pluralizing and genericizing suffix ら (ra).”
えん
- “From Middle Chinese 猿 (MC hjwon).”
- “The kan'on pronunciation, so likely a later borrowing.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.