First opened Saturday, April 3, 2010
米
こめ
- 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).
uncooked rice
Many theories for “rice”, from “doing with one's heart” to Austronesian cousins — the last called extremely speculative.
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 米
In a sentence
父は米を栽培している。
My father grows rice.
日本では米が主食です。
The main diet in Japan is rice.
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.
- “⟨ko₂me₂⟩ → */kəməj/ → /kome/”
- “From Old Japanese. First appears in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, with the phonetic man'yōgana spelling 渠(こ)梅(め). In turn, from Proto-Japonic *kəmay.”
- Hedged“Many theories exist regarding the ultimate derivation:”
- Hedged“* Perhaps from 籠(こ)め (kome), the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 籠(こ)める (komeru, “to do with one's heart”)., from the way rice is farmed. The accent of kome in the Heian period is , while kome- in the Heian period is .”
- Hedged“* Possibly cognate with Proto-Vietic *kəːm (“cooked rice”), modern cơm.”
- Hedged“* Possibly cognate with Proto-Austronesian *Semay and Old Chinese 糜 (OC *mral). However, this is extremely speculative; none of the known derivations from Proto-Austronesian *Semay develop initial /k/, nor is this shift explainable by any known mechanism within Japonic.”
Source: Wiktionary: 米 (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 米 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こめ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
よね
- “⟨yo₂nai⟩ → */jənai/ → */jəne/ → /jone/”
- “First attested in the Wamyō Ruijushō (938 CE).”
- “From Proto-Japonic *yənəi; possibly related to 稲 (ine, “rice plant”).”
- “The colloquial sense is derived from the components of the 米 kanji: 八 (hachi, “eight”) + 十 (jū, “ten”) + 八 (hachi, “eight”).”
めめ
- “Probably a shortened reduplication of kome (see above).”
- “First cited to a work from 1275.”
べい・まい
- “From Middle Chinese 米 (MC mejX).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.