First opened Thursday, January 21, 2010
桜
さくら
- 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).
cherry blossom, cherry tree
Cherry blossoms may be named for what they do: bloom in bursts.
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.
Written with 桜
In a sentence
さくらは満開だった。
The cherry trees were in flower.
その彫像はさくら材の木片を刻んで作らせた。
The statue was carved from a block of cherry wood.
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, first attested in the Kojiki, the oldest extant historical record of ancient Japan, compiled in 712 CE.”
- “Originally derived from 咲く (saku, “to bloom, burst open”) + 等 (-ra, nominalizing and pluralizing suffix).”
Source: Wiktionary: 桜 (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 桜 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さくら. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おう
- “/au/ → /ɔː/ → /oː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 櫻 (MC 'eang).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.