First opened Thursday, April 8, 2010
卵
たまご
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
egg
An egg is a “ball child”: 玉 (tama) + 子 (ko), with ko voiced to go.
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 卵
In a sentence
卵は嫌いです。
I don't care for eggs.
鳥は卵を産む。
Birds lay eggs.
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 玉 (tama, “ball”) + 子 (ko, “child, small thing”). The ko reading for 子 changes to go as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 卵 (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 卵 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not たまご. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
らん
- “From Middle Chinese 卵 (MC lwanX).”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).