First opened Friday, May 7, 2010
姉
あね
- 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).
(my) older sister (humble)
Elder sister (ane) and elder brother (ani) may be apophonic twins; the source says the derivation is 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 姉
In a sentence
私の姉は甘党だ。
My sister has a sweet tooth.
彼女は私の姉です。
She is my elder sister.
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”):”
- “*: ⟨a no₂ ye⟩ → */anʉʲɨe/ → /ane/”
- “* An apophonic form of 兄 (ani, “elder brother”).”
- Hedged“* Several other theories have also been suggested.”
Source: Wiktionary: 姉 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.