First opened Saturday, September 27, 2008
棚
たな
- flat (heiban)
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).
shelves, rack
棚, “shelves, rack”, was written with the phonetic man'yōgana 多奈 in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.
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 棚
In a sentence
棚にアルバムがある。
There is an album on the shelf.
本が一冊棚から落ちた。
A book dropped from the shelf.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE with the phonetic man'yōgana spelling of 多奈 ⟨tana⟩. In turn, from Proto-Japonic *tana.”
Source: Wiktionary: 棚 (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).
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.