First opened Thursday, May 6, 2010
兄
あに
- 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).
(my) older brother (humble)
Elder brother is perhaps “my” + の + “eldest sibling”: 吾 (a) + の (no) + 兄 (ye), though the source calls it unclear.
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 兄
In a sentence
兄がいます。
I have an older brother.
私の兄は健康だ。
My brother is healthy.
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 of unclear derivation:”
- Hedged“* Probably originally a compound of 吾 (a, Eastern Old Japanese first-person pronoun) + の (no, possessive particle) + 兄 (ye → e, “eldest sibling”, see below):”
- “*: ⟨a no₂ ye⟩ → */anʉʲɨe/ → /ani/”
- Hedged“* Alternatively, an apophonic form of 姉 (ane, “elder sister”), itself possibly from the same derivation above.”
- Hedged“* Several other theories have also been suggested.”
Source: Wiktionary: 兄 (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 兄 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あに. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
けい
- “*/kwæi/ → /kʷæi/ → /keː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 兄 (MC xjwaeng).”
え
- “/je/ → /e/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
せ
- “From Old Japanese.”
このかみ
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Originally a compound of 子 (ko, “child”) + の (no, possessive particle) + 上 (kami, “upper”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.