First opened Sunday, February 1, 2009
筆
ふで
- 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).
writing brush
筆, “writing brush”, shifted from fumite to fude, the medial み nasalizing the vowel and voicing the next consonant.
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 筆
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.
- “/fumite/ → /fũnde/ → /fude/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from fumite below, caused by a regular shift where medial み (mi) causes nasalization of the preceding vowel and voicing of the following consonant, with the nasalization reverting in some cases. Now the most common pronunciation in modern Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 筆 (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 筆 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ふで. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ふんで
- “/fumite/ → /fũnde/ → /funde/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from fumite below, caused by a regular shift where medial み (mi) causes nasalization of the preceding vowel and voicing of the following consonant. Listed with this reading in the 観智院 (Kanchi-in) edition of the 11th- or 12th-century 類聚名義抄 (Ruiju Myōgishō) dictionary.”
- “Superseded by the fude reading above in modern Japanese.”
ふみて
- “Compound of 文 (fumi, “writing”) + 手 (te, “hand”). Appears with this reading in the Man'yōshū, circa 759.”
- “Superseded by the fude reading above in modern Japanese.”
ひつ
- “/pitu/ → /fitu/ → /hitu/”
- “From Middle Chinese 筆 /笔 (pit, “writing brush”). Compare modern Hakka and Min Nan pit, Mandarin bǐ.”
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.