First opened Tuesday, March 16, 2010
葉
は
- 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).
leaf
Leaf, feather, tooth, blade: Wiktionary lists them as possible kin, then notes that their pitch accents disagree.
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 葉
In a sentence
葉が落ちた。
The leaves fell.
秋には葉が散る。
The leaves fall in autumn.
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.
- “/pa/ → /ɸa/ → /ha/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pa.”
- Hedged“Probably cognate with Old Japanese verb 生(は)ゆ (hayu, “to sprout, to grow”) → modern 生(は)える (haeru), and with 羽(は) (ha, “feather; wing”).”
- Hedged“Suggested in some sources as possibly cognate with 歯(は) (ha, “tooth”), from the way that both sprout and then later fall, and with 刃(は) (ha, “blade”) from similarities in shape (cf. English blade). However, the pitch accent patterns are different; 葉 and 羽 are both unaccented, while 歯 and 刃 are both accented. This may reflect two disparate *pa roots in the ancient language.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE with the phonetic spelling 波.”
- “Cognate with Okinawan 葉 (fā).”
Source: Wiktionary: 葉 (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 葉 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not は. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
よう
- “/epu/ → /efu/ → /eu/ → /joː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 葉 (MC yep, “leaf”).”
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.