First opened Saturday, April 17, 2010
湯
ゆ
- 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).
hot water
Yu goes back to Proto-Japonic *yu and appears in both the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Man'yōshū.
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 湯
In a sentence
砂糖は湯に入れると溶ける。
Sugar dissolves in hot water.
この湯は精神と肉体の調和をもたらすと言われています。
It is said that this hot water brings a balance between body and mind.
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 Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *yu.”
- “First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. Also used in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 湯 (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 湯 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ゆ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ぶう
- “Baby talk. Possibly onomatopoeic of a person blowing on a hot beverage.”
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.