First opened Sunday, May 2, 2010
馬
うま
- 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).
horse; promoted bishop (in Japanese chess known as shogi)
Was it muma? Wiktionary notes the “ma” horse words across Asia, even English mare, but says no consensus exists.
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 馬
In a sentence
しばらくこのうまにのってもよいですか。
Can I ride this horse for a long time?
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
- Hedged“The initial m sound was apparently emphasized, possibly similar to *mma, becoming then uma or muma, via processes also seen in the word 梅 (ume, mume, “plum”). However, Pellard simply reconstructs Proto-Japonic *uma and treats the mentioned processes as secondary.”
- Hedged“The ma sound denoting "horse" is common to a number of languages of central Asia, where horses were first domesticated, which has led some to speculate about a possible cognate root (but no consensus on any kind of relation exists). Compare Manchu ᠮᠣᡵᡳᠨ (morin, “horse”), Mongolian морь (morʹ, “horse”), Korean 말 (mal, “horse”), Mandarin 馬 /马 (mǎ, “horse”), and Proto-Indo-European *márkos (“horse”) and descendants such as Irish marc (“horse”, archaic) or English mare (“female horse”). More at *márkos.”
Source: Wiktionary: 馬 (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 馬 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
むま
- “Shift from uma form, becoming more common starting from the Heian Period. This change later reverted, and muma is now considered obsolete.”
んま
- “Possibly from preform *Nma; ultimately from Proto-Japonic *Cma.”
んーま
- “Possibly from preform *MCma; ultimately from Proto-Japonic *Cma.”
ば
- “From Middle Chinese 馬 (MC maeX). The 漢音 (kan'on), so a later borrowing. Compare Min Nan 馬 /马 (bé, bée, má) where some of the readings show a shift from initial nasal /m-/ to voiced plosive /b-/.”
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.