First opened Saturday, December 19, 2009
新た
あらた
- 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).
new, fresh
“New” began as “freshly coming into being”.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Written with 新
In a sentence
あらたな困難が現れた。
A new difficulty presented itself.
新たな議論が提起された。
A new argument was presented.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Attested in the Man'yōshū, completed in 759.”
- Hedged“Derived as a compound of 新 (ara, from 生る (aru, “to come into being”), cognate also with 有り (ari, “to exist”, the Old and classical Japanese copula), 現れる (arawareru, “to appear, to become manifest”), 荒 (ara, “rough, unfinished”), numerous other terms) + た (ta, suffix indicating state). The core meaning seems to have been "freshly coming into being", and by extension, new.”
Source: Wiktionary: 新た (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
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.