First opened Sunday, May 9, 2010
昨夜
ゆうべ
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
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).
last night
Yūbe, “last night”, is a shift from 夕べ (“evening”), and its kanji spelling comes from sakuya.
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.
In a sentence
ゆうべ霜が降りた。
It frosted last night.
昨夜は良く眠れた。
I slept well last night.
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.
- “Shift from 夕べ (yūbe, “evening”), which has an additional 平板型 (heiban-gata) or [0] accent pitch.”
- “The kanji spelling is from sakuya above.”
- “Cognate with Northern Amami Ōshima ゆぶぃ (yubï, “last night”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 昨夜 (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 昨夜 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ゆうべ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さくや
- “From Middle Chinese 昨夜 (MC dzak yaeH).”
ゆんべ
- “/juɸube/ → */juːbe/ → /junbe/ → /jumbe/”
- “Shift from yūbe above.”
よべ
- “The kanji spelling is from sakuya above.”
よんべ
- “/jobe/ → */joːbe/ → /jonbe/ → /jombe/”
- “Shift from yobe above.”
- “The kanji spelling is from sakuya above.”
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.