First opened Monday, April 12, 2010
雪
ゆき
- 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).
snow
Snow is yuki, but one eastern-dialect song in the Man'yōshū has yoki, and some reconstruct *yoki as the ancestor.
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 雪
In a sentence
雪は消えた。
The snow has disappeared.
今日は雪です。
It's snowy today.
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.
- “⟨yuki₁⟩ → */jukʲi/ → /juki/”
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
- “Also found once in the Man'yōshū in a so-called 東歌 (Azuma uta, literally “eastern song”) in the eastern dialect of Old Japanese, realized as ⟨yo₂ki₁⟩.”
- “Reconstructed by some as deriving from Proto-Japonic *yoki.”
Source: Wiktionary: 雪 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.