First opened Thursday, March 18, 2010
林
はやし
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
- 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).
woods, forest
A hayashi may have been a deliberately planted grove: the word derives from the transitive verb 生やす (“to grow”).
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 林
In a sentence
林に竹が目立つ。
Bamboo stands out in the woods.
林の中でいっぱい虫にさされた。
I got a lot of insect bites in the woods.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First mentioned in the Man'yōshū, completed in 759 CE.”
- Hedged“Derives from the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 生やす (hayasu, “to grow”). The root verb is in the transitive form, suggesting that the original sense of hayashi may have indicated a deliberately planted or managed grove.”
Source: Wiktionary: 林 (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 林 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はやし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
りん
- “/rimʉ/ → /riɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 林 (MC lim).”
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.