First opened Friday, April 30, 2010
犬
いぬ
- 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).
dog
Derivation uncertain: from “to leave”, from “house” + “sleep”, from 狗 — or borrowed from some unknown language.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 犬
In a sentence
これらのイヌは大きい。
These dogs are big.
いぬが後についてきた。
The dog followed me.
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.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *enu. Derivation uncertain. Various theories exist, including derivation from ancient verb 往ぬ (inu, “to leave, to be gone”), from the way a dog will guard the house while the master is away; from a compound of 家 (ie, “house, home”) + 寝 (nu, “to sleep”, ancient monosyllabic form of modern 寝る neru); from ancient Japanese 狗 (enu < wenu, “puppy, dog”), itself of uncertain derivation; or as a borrowing from some other unknown language.”
Source: Wiktionary: 犬 (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.