First opened Tuesday, March 30, 2010
風
かぜ
- 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).
wind, breeze
Reconstructed as Proto-Japonic *kansai — with an n that modern kaze no longer has.
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 風
In a sentence
風が凪いだ。
The wind has fallen.
風は南へ吹く。
The wind blows south.
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, from Proto-Japonic *kansai.”
Source: Wiktionary: 風 (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 風 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かぜ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かざ
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *kansai.”
- “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), 雨(あま) (ama) and 雨(あめ) (ame), or 酒(さか) (saka) and 酒(さけ) (sake).”
ち
- “From Old Japanese.”
て
- “Shift from Old Japanese 風 (ti), modern chi above, found in some compounds.”
し
- “From Old Japanese. May be related to chi above.”
ふう
- “/puː/ → /fuː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 風 (MC pjuwng).”
- “In Old Japanese, this kanji was used to transcribe the 借音 (shakuon) kana of ⟨pu⟩ and ⟨bu⟩ in the Nihon Shoki (720 CE).”
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.