First opened Monday, January 18, 2010
部屋
へや
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
a room
A room was once a “separate house” — へ plus や.
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
部屋を出ろ。
You must go out of the room.
部屋を片づけて。
Clean up the room.
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.
- “Originally a compound of へ (he, “separate”) + 屋(や) (ya, “roof; house”). The へ (he) is related to the first element in 隔(へだ)たる (hedataru, “to be apart, to be separated”). First attested in the late 900s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 部屋 (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.