First opened Tuesday, April 27, 2010
星
ほし
- 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).
star
Hoshi began as posi, from Proto-Japonic *pəsi.
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 星
In a sentence
星に願いを。
Let me wish upon a shooting star.
星が出てきた。
The stars came out.
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.
- “/posi/ → /ɸoɕi/ → /hoɕi/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pəsi.”
Source: Wiktionary: 星 (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 星 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ほし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
せい
- “From Middle Chinese 星 (MC seng).”
- “The Singapore sense derives from the pre-World War Two kanji spelling 星加坡 (modern kanji spelling 新加坡) as borrowed from Chinese, itself a transliteration of Malay Singapura.”
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.