First opened Friday, July 25, 2008
琴
こと
- 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).
Japanese harp
琴, “Japanese harp”, is possibly a compound of 木 (ko, “tree, wood”) and 音 (oto, “sound”), with a medial o dropped.
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 琴
In a sentence
彼女は琴を弾くことがとても好きだ。
She likes to play the koto very much.
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.
- “⟨ko₂to₂⟩ → */kətə/ → /koto/”
- “From Old Japanese, attested in the three major literature works of the Nara period: the Kojiki (712 CE), the Nihon Shoki (720 CE), and the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE).”
- Hedged“Possibly derived from a compound of elements 木 (ko, “tree, wood”, combining form) + 音 (oto, “sound”), with the additional medial o dropped by haplology.”
Source: Wiktionary: 琴 (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 琴 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
きん
- “/kimʉ/ → /kiɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 琴 (MC gim). The kan'on pronunciation, so likely a later borrowing.”
くむ・ぐん・ことえ・ことざき・ことみ
- “Various nanori readings.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.