First opened Wednesday, July 7, 2010
別
べつ
- 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).
distinction, different
Betsu is from Ainu ペッ (pet, “water, river”), and its kanji spelling is an example of ateji.
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 別
In a sentence
別の機会を待て。
Wait for a second chance.
恋愛と結婚は別だ。
Falling in love is one thing; getting married is another.
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.
- “From Ainu ペッ (pet, “water, river”). The kanji spelling is an example of ateji.”
Source: Wiktionary: 別 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.