First opened Sunday, August 2, 2009
仮名
かな
- 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).
kana
Kana means “borrowed name” — characters lent for their sounds.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “/karina/ → /kanna/ → /kana/”
- Hedged“Contraction of 仮(かん)名(な) (kanna) above. The reading may appear to be jūbakoyomi, but is instead actually an irregular development of the kun'yomi.”
Source: Wiktionary: 仮名 (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 仮名 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かりな
- “From Old Japanese. Compound of 仮(かり) (kari, “borrowing, provisional thing”, cognate with verb 借(か)る (karu, “to borrow”), the Old Japanese form of modern 借(か)りる (kariru)) + 名(な) (na, “name, character”), from the way that Chinese characters were borrowed for their phonetic values to spell out the sounds of native Japanese words.”
- “Used in contrast to 真(ま)名(な) (mana, “true name, true character”), a synonym for 漢(かん)字(じ) (kanji), indicating Chinese characters used for their meaning instead of for their sound.”
かんな
- “/karina/ → /kanna/”
- “Contraction of 仮(かり)名(な) (karina) above.”
かめい
- “From Middle Chinese 假名 (MC kaeX mjieng, literally “borrowed, false” + “name”). The kan'on reading, so probably a somewhat later borrowing from Chinese. Compare modern Cantonese reading gaa² meng⁴⁻².”
けみょう
- “/kemjau/ → /kemjɔː/ → /kemjoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 假名 (MC kaeX mjieng, literally “borrowed, false” + “name”). The goon reading, so probably an earlier borrowing from Chinese. Compare modern Min Nan reading ké-miâ.”
- “The Buddhist sense derives from use of this term in Chinese as a translation of Sanskrit प्रज्ञप्ति (prajñapti, “appointing → provisional naming”), used in some Buddhist schools to refer to the practice of conceptualising and naming things that are not real.”
What the labels mean
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.