First opened Friday, March 19, 2010
山
やま
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
mountain
Mountain and forest in one: Proto-Japonic *yama meant “mountain; forest”.
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 山
In a sentence
私は山にいく。
I go to the mountain.
山に顔があるよ。
There are big faces on it.
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 Old Japanese 山 (yama). First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Reconstructed as deriving in turn from Proto-Japonic *yama (“mountain; forest”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 山 (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 山 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not やま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さん
- “From Middle Chinese 山 (MC srean).”
- “Sometimes spelled with rendaku (連濁), as -zan.”
むれ
- “From Old Japanese, itself apparently a borrowing from Old Korean. See Korean 뫼 (moe) for more.”
- “The phonetic man'yōgana spelling 牟礼 for mure appears first in the Kojiki of 720 CE, but instead for the stem of verb 群れる (mureru, “to group together”). The first instance of this spelling for the mountain sense is in the Heian period, in different 日本書紀私記 (Nihon Shoki Shiki) versions, themselves recompilations of the Nihon Shoki. This reading with this sense apparently arises from the traditional 訓読 (kundoku) of a particular section of the Nihon Shoki, where the written word 山 is read as mure with an apparent meaning of mountain or hill.”
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.