First opened Sunday, March 28, 2010
雨
あめ
- 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).
rain
Rain and candy are both ame today, but Wiktionary keeps them as distinct Old Japanese words, ame2 and ame1.
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 雨
In a sentence
雨は止んだ。
It has stopped raining.
雨が止んだ。
It has stopped raining.
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.
- “⟨ame₂⟩ → */aməɨ/ → /ame/”
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *amay.”
- “Cognate with 天 (ame, unbound apophonic of ama, “sky”), as in the location of clouds where water precipitates from.”
- “Distinct from 飴 (⟨ame₁⟩ → ame, “candy”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 雨 (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 雨 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あめ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あま
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *amay.”
- “A bound apophonic form only appearing in compounds. Compare the formation of 目(ま) (ma, bound form in compounds) and 目(め) (me, standalone form), 手(た) (ta) and 手(て) (te), 風(かざ) (kaza) and 風(かぜ) (kaze), or 酒(さか) (saka) and 酒(さけ) (sake).”
う
- “From Middle Chinese 雨 (MC hjuX).”
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.