First opened Friday, April 16, 2010
炎
ほのお
- 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).
flame
Flame is “fire's ear of grain”: 火 (ho) + の (no) + 穂 (ho).
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 炎
In a sentence
炎を弱くしなさい。
Turn the flame down low.
炎が森を包み込んだ。
Fire devoured the forest.
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.
- “⟨po no₂ po⟩ → */ponəpo/ → /ɸonoɸo/ → /ɸonowo/ → /honowo/ → /hono.o/”
- “From Old Japanese 炎 (pono₂po).”
- “Compound of 火 (ho, combining form of hi, “fire”) + の (no, possessive particle) + 穂 (ho, “ear (of grain)”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 炎 (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 炎 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ほのお. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ほむら
- “Compound of 火 (ho, “fire”, combining form) + 群 (mura, “gathering, group”).”
えん
- “/emʉ/ → /eɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 炎 (MC hjem).”
えん
- “炎 is a daiyōji replacing 焔.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.