First opened Wednesday, March 18, 2009
象
ぞう
- 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).
elephant
象, “elephant”, is a goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing from Middle Chinese.
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 象
In a sentence
象は鼻が長い。
An elephant has a long nose.
貴方は、象が好き。
You like elephants.
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.
- “/zau/ → /zɔː/ → /zoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 象 (zjang^X, “elephant; image, resemblance”). Compare modern Cantonese reading zoeng⁶.”
- Hedged“The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing.”
Source: Wiktionary: 象 (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 象 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ぞう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しょう
- “/sjau/ → /sjɔː/ → /ɕɔː/ → /ɕoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 象 (zjang^X, “elephant; image, resemblance”). Compare modern Min Nan reading siōng or Mandarin xiàng.”
- “The kan'on reading, so likely a later borrowing.”
きさ
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Kokugo Dai Jiten proposes cognacy with 橒 (kisa, “wood grain”), from the way that ivory also has a grain. Vovin (2021) instead derived 象 (kisa) from Austroasiatic by adducing attested and reconstructed Austroasiatic comparanda meaning "elephant" like Proto-Palaungic *(k)caaŋ (whence Tai Loi [script needed] (k’sang), Kem Degne Blang [script needed] (kesaŋ), Samtao [script needed] (kǝsáŋ), Danau [script needed] (kǝtsaŋ⁴)), Proto-Katuic *Ɂaciaŋ, Proto-Vietic *ʔa-ɟaːŋ, and Cuang Khmu [script needed] (sca:ŋ).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.