First opened Monday, May 11, 2009
今年
ことし
- 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).
this year
“This year” is spelled with 今, “now” — but the word began with 此, “this”.
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.
In a sentence
彼はことしわたしが英語を教えている生徒です。
He is a student who I am teaching English this year.
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.
- “Compound of 此(こ) (ko, “this”) + 年(とし) (toshi, “year”).”
- “The use of the kanji 今 (“now”) instead of 此 (“this”) is an orthographic borrowing from Chinese 今年 (jīnnián).”
Source: Wiktionary: 今年 (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 今年 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ことし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こんねん
- “From Middle Chinese 今年 (MC kim nen).”
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.