First opened Wednesday, March 24, 2010
村
むら
- 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).
village
A village is either “a gathering” (from 群れる) or a word from Old Korean — the source does not pick.
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 村
In a sentence
その湖がむらに水を供給している。
The lake supplies water to the village.
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, from Proto-Japonic *mura.”
- Hedged“Either formed from the nominalization of 群れる (mureru, “to gather”), or from Old Korean. In Old Korean toponyms, this appears with the phonetic spelling 牟羅 (*mura). Compare Korean 무리 (muri, “group, crowd”), also possibly cognate with 群れる (mureru, “to gather”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 村 (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 村 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not むら. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
そん
- “From Middle Chinese 村 (MC tshwon).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.