First opened Friday, July 2, 2010
東
ひがし
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
east
Higashi was hingashi: /ɸiŋɡaɕi/ → /ɸiɡaɕi/ → /hiɡaɕi/.
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 東
In a sentence
月は東から上る。
The moon rises in the east.
風は東から吹いている。
The wind is blowing from the east.
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.
- “/ɸiŋɡaɕi/ → /ɸiɡaɕi/ → /hiɡaɕi/”
- “Sound shift from hingashi (see Etymology 2 below).”
- “Now the standard word for east.”
Source: Wiktionary: 東 (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 東 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひがし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひんがし
- “*⟨pi₁ muka si⟩ → */pʲimukasi/ → /pimʉɡasi/ → /ɸimʉɡaɕi/ → /ɸiŋɡaɕi/ → /hiŋɡaɕi/”
- “Shift from Old Japanese 東 (*pi₁mukasi).”
あずま
- “⟨aduma⟩ → /ad͡zuma/ → /azuma/”
- “From Old Japanese, itself of unknown derivation.”
とう
- “From Middle Chinese 東 (MC tuwng).”
とん
- “From Mandarin 東 /东 (dōng).”
- “Compare Wu 東 /东 (ton), Hakka 東 /东 (tûng), Min Nan 東 /东 (tong).”
あきら
- “Nominalization of the stem of adjective 明らか (akiraka, “clear”).”
のぼる
- “Nominalization of verb 上る, 登る (noboru, “to ascend, rise”).”
はじめ
- “Nominalization of the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 始める (hajimeru, “to begin, start”).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.