First opened Saturday, January 23, 2010
風邪
かぜ
- 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).
cold, flu
かぜ is just the word for “wind” — the 邪 is along for the spelling.
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
かぜが治らない。
I can't get rid of my cold.
風邪引いちゃうよ。
You will catch cold.
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 風(かぜ) (kaze, “wind”).”
- “The kanji is jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), from Chinese 風邪 /风邪 (fēngxié).”
- “First attested in 984.”
Source: Wiktionary: 風邪 (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 風邪 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かぜ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ふうじゃ
- “From Middle Chinese 風邪 (MC pjuwng zjae).”
What the labels mean
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.