First opened Wednesday, April 8, 2009
灯
ひ
- 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).
light
灯, “light”, is cognate with and an extension of 火 (hi, “fire”).
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 灯
In a sentence
がは灯に集まる。
Moths are attracted by light.
窓に灯がともっていた。
There was a light burning in the window.
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.
- “Cognate with and extension of 火 (hi, “fire”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 灯 (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 灯 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
とう
- “From Middle Chinese 燈 (MC tong).”
ともし
- “First attested around the 10th century, maybe related to etymology 1 or Proto-Tungusic *toga (“fire”).”
- “Nominalization of 灯し (tomoshi), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 灯す (tomosu, “to light”).”
ともしび
- “Compound of 灯し (tomoshi, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 灯す (tomosu), “to light”) + 火 (hi, “fire”).”
- “The hi changes to bi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
とぼし
- “Nominalization of 灯し (toboshi), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 灯す (tobosu, “to light”, archaic).”
- “Equivalent to a shift from tomoshi above, with the nasal /-m-/ becomes plosive /-b-/.”
とぼしび
- “Compound of 灯し (toboshi, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 灯す (tobosu), “to light”, archaic) + 火 (hi, “fire”). The hi changes to bi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “Equivalent to a shift from tomoshibi above, the nasal /-m-/ becomes plosive /-b-/.”
あかし
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 明かす (akasu, “to go through the whole night”).”
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.