First opened Wednesday, December 30, 2009
言葉
ことば
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
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).
language; word(s); expression(s)
“Word” is an old “word” plus an “edge” — and the 葉 in the spelling is only a stand-in.
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
彼女はことば遊びが好きだ。
She likes word games.
彼女は彼のことばで気を悪くした。
She felt hurt at his words.
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 言葉 (ko₂to₂ba), attestable since at least the Man'yōshū of 759 CE. In turn, reconstructed as deriving from Proto-Japonic *kətənpa.”
- “Compound of 言(こと) (koto, “word”) + 端(は) (ha, “edge, beginning, end”). The ha changes to ba as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- Hedged“The term 言(こと) (koto) was formerly the main term for word in Japanese. This term is also cognate with 事(こと) (koto, “thing, fact, event”). The ha may have been added to differentiate from 事(こと) (koto).”
- “The 葉 spelling is an example of ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 言葉 (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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.