First opened Thursday, February 4, 2010
田舎
いなか
- 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).
rural, countryside
いなか began as “winaka”, and its kanji came from a Chinese word.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
彼女はいなかに住んでいる。
She lives in the country.
私の家はいなかにあります。
My home is in the country.
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.
- “/winaka/ → /inaka/”
- Hedged“Possibly a compound of 居 (i, the 未然形 (mizenkei, “incomplete form”) and 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem form”) of verb 居る (iru), “to be, exist (of animate objects)”) + 中 (naka, “inside, middle”).”
- “The spelling is from Chinese 田舍 (tiánshè).”
Source: Wiktionary: 田舎 (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 田舎 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いなか. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
でんしゃ・でんじゃ
- “Also read with rendaku (連濁), as denja.”
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.