First opened Friday, April 2, 2010
虹
にじ
- 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).
rainbow
The rainbow may once have been nuji or noji: the source suggests a shift from those earlier readings.
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 虹
In a sentence
虹は７色だ。
The rainbow has seven colors.
虹は自然現象である。
A rainbow is a natural phenomenon.
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.
- “⟨nizi⟩ → /niʑi/”
- “From Old Japanese 虹 (nizi), ultimately from Proto-Japonic *nonsi. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- Hedged“Also attested as man’yōgana form 爾自 in the 金光明最勝王経音義 (Konkōmyō Saishōō-kyō Ongi) of 1079. May be a shift from earlier ぬじ (nuji) or のじ (noji) readings.”
Source: Wiktionary: 虹 (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 虹 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not にじ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こう
- “From Middle Chinese 虹 (MC huwng).”
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.