First opened Monday, April 5, 2010
鍋
なべ
- 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).
saucepan, pot
A pot named for a snack: 鍋 is na (“small snack”) + he (“pot”), with rendaku turning he into be.
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 鍋
In a sentence
鍋を焦げつかせるな。
Don't let the pan boil dry.
鍋がふきこぼれているよ。
The pot is boiling over.
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.
- “⟨nabe₂⟩ → */naⁿbe/ → /nabe/”
- “From Old Japanese, first cited in the Nihon Shoki of 720. In turn, reconstructed as Proto-Japonic *nanpay.”
- “Originally a compound of Old Japanese elements 肴 (na, “small snack, hors d'oeuvre”) + 瓮 (pe, modern he, “a pot or pan for holding food or beverages”). The he changes to be as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 鍋 (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).
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.