First opened Tuesday, January 19, 2010
今朝
けさ
- 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).
this morning
けさ is “this morning” — but the 今 in it is a stand-in for an older “this”.
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
けさは列車が遅れた。
The train was late this morning.
私はけさボブに会った。
I saw Bob this morning.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. Originally a compound of 此 (ke, “this”) + 朝 (asa, “morning”).”
- “The initial /ke/ is an alternative form of the initial /ko/ (此, “this”) seen in words such as ここ (koko, “this place → here”) or これ (kore, “this [nominal] → this”), and the final /sa/ is a contraction from */ke.asa/ to /kesa/ with the medial -a- falling out, as Old Japanese did not permit vowel clusters.”
- “It is the same element found in 今日 (kepu→kyō, “today”).”
- “The use of the kanji 今 (“now”) instead of 此 (“this”) is an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 今朝 (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 今朝 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not けさ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こんちょう
- “/konteu/ → /kontjoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese compound 今朝 (MC kim trjew, literally “now morning”). The /eu/ → /joː/ sound shift is a regular phonological change.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.