First opened Thursday, August 6, 2009
ピアノ
ピアノ
- 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).
piano
The piano is a clipped “pianoforte” — or a plain Italian word, depending on the source.
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
古いピアノだよ。
It's an old piano.
ピアノは高いです。
A piano is expensive.
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.
- Hedged“From Italian piano, possibly via English piano. Some sources derive this as a clipping of ピアノフォルテ (pianoforute, “pianoforte”), itself borrowed from Italian pianoforte.”
Source: Wiktionary: ピアノ (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).
What the labels mean
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.