First opened Thursday, August 5, 2010
昼
ひる
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
noon, daytime
Hiru is derived from 日 (hi, “day”), plus an element ru of unclear meaning that 夜 (yoru) seems to share.
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 昼
In a sentence
彼女は昼ごろ現れた。
She made her appearance around noon.
彼は昼眠って夜働く。
He sleeps by day and works by 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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨pi₁ru⟩ → */pʲiru/ → /ɸiru/ → /hiru/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *piru (“daytime”).”
- Hedged“Derived from 日(ひ) (hi, “day”), suffixed with an element ru of unclear meaning. Compare 夜(よる) (yoru, “night, evening”), which seems to use this same ru element.”
Source: Wiktionary: 昼 (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 昼 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひる. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ちゅう
- “/tiu/ → /t͡ɕiu/ → /t͡ɕuː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 晝 (MC trjuwH).”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.