First opened Monday, March 15, 2010
木
き
- 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).
tree, wood, timber
Tree is ki, with a Ryukyuan cousin *ke, and it is first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.
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 木
In a sentence
木を折るな。
Don't break the branches.
木が燃える。
Wood burns.
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.
- “⟨ki₂⟩ → */kɨ/ → /ki/”
- “From Old Japanese 木 (ki₂), from Proto-Japonic *kəi. Cognate with Proto-Ryukyuan *ke. For the vowel alternation, see Wiktionary:About Proto-Japonic § Standalone forms and combining forms.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 木 (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 木 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not き. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こ
- “⟨ko₂⟩ → */kə/ → /ko/”
- “From Old Japanese 木 (ko₂).”
- “Likely the original form of ki above. Obsolete in modern Japanese, never found in isolation; only found in compounds and certain idioms.”
もく
- “From Middle Chinese 木 (MC muwk). Compare modern Cantonese 木 (muk⁶).”
ぼく
- “From Middle Chinese 木 (MC muwk). Compare literary Min Nan 木 (bo̍k).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.