First opened Thursday, April 29, 2010
猫
ねこ
- 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).
cat
One dictionary says neko is a shortening of nekoma, but neko is attested in 794 and nekoma only in 918.
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 猫
In a sentence
ネコがいる。
There is a cat.
猫に九生あり。
A cat has nine lives.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨neko₁⟩ → /neko/”
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. Cognate with Miyako にか (nika, “cat”, Tarama and Minna dialects) via unknown Japonic substratum.”
- “Listed in modern references as a compound of ね (ne, onomatopoeia of the sound a cat makes; compare modern Japanese にゃ (nya), English mew, meow) + こ (ko, diminutive noun-forming suffix). According to the 和(わ)名(みょう)類(るい)聚(じゅ)抄(しょう) (Wamyō Ruijushō) of 931–938, neko is a shortening of 猫(ねこま) (nekoma), but neko appears in texts earlier than nekoma: neko is first attested in the Shin'yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki of 794, while nekoma is not attested until 918 in the 本(ほん)草(ぞう)和(わ)名(みょう) (Honzō Wamyō, the oldest surviving dictionary of medicine in Japan).”
- “A comparison of accent patterns between the dialects shows some confusion (see dialectal data):”
- “* One group of dialects behaves as if was the Heian Kyoto accent pattern: many dialects with the Tokyo type accent, including the standard Japanese in Tokyo, pronounce this word with an pitch pattern, and in some non-mainstream Keihan type dialects as well, this word has a corresponding pitch pattern.”
- “* Another group of dialects behaves as if was the Heian Kyoto accent pattern: the mainstream Keihan type dialects pronounce this word with an pitch pattern, and in a few of the Tokyo type dialects, this word has a corresponding pitch pattern.”
- Hedged“As a result, this term is one example of words that have the same pitch accent pattern between Tokyo and Osaka/Kyoto. The confusion seems to be due to an impression that the term comes from a compound word origin.”
Source: Wiktionary: 猫 (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 猫 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ねこ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ねこま
- “According to the 和(わ)名(みょう)類(るい)聚(じゅ)抄(しょう) (Wamyō Ruijushō) of 931–938, the term 猫(ねこ) (neko) is a shortening of nekoma.”
- “:”
- “猫: 野王案、猫、音苗、禰古麻、下總本有和名二字興河海抄引此合、本草和名同訓、或省云禰古、新撰字鏡、狸、禰古、按狸一名猫、見本草和名、似虎而小、熊捕鼠為糧”
- “Cat. According to Yewang, cat, sound-reading myō, [Japanese reading] nekoma; later compendia have a two character Japanese name - perhaps the Rivers and Seas Annotations references this compilation, the Honzō wamyō [has] a kun homophone, certain omissions call it 'neko', [in the] Shinsen Jikyō 'tanuki' - [read] neko, to check 'tanuki' [as] one name [for] a cat - see the Honzō wamyō; like a tiger but small, the creature catches rats for food”
- “However, nekoma is first cited to 918 in the 本(ほん)草(ぞう)和(わ)名(みょう) (Honzō Wamyō, the oldest surviving dictionary of medicine in Japan), while 猫(ねこ) (neko) is first attested earlier in the Shin'yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki of 794.”
- “家狸、一名猫、和名禰古末”
- “A house raccoon; also called a cat; the Japanese name is nekoma.”
- “One theory about the derivation describes the first mora ⟨ne⟩ as onomatopoeia for the sound a cat makes, compare modern Japanese にゃ (nya), English mew, meow. The last two morae ⟨ko₁ma⟩ might accord with 熊(くま) (kuma, “bear”) if it were from Proto-Japonic *koma (class 2.3 ), in the sense of "four-legged animal". However, Japanese kuma appears to have cognates in ancient Koreanic sources meaning specifically "bear" (see the 熊(くま) (kuma, “bear”) entry for further details), making this theory less likely.”
- “The Heian Kyoto accent of this word is ; note that in compound words for species names, the pitch pattern may be simplified to <-HL> when the final element is a 2-mora noun (e.g. 青(あお)海(の)苔(り) (aonori ← àwònórì ← *àwò-nòrì, “green laver”), and the presence or absence of this phenomenon could explain the accent confusion in neko.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.