First opened Wednesday, August 11, 2010
三
さん
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
three
San went */sam/ → /samu/ → /saɴ/, from Middle Chinese 三.
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 三
In a sentence
私たちは一日に三回、犬に餌を与えている。
We feed our dog three times a day.
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.
- “*/sam/ → /samu/ → /saɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 三 (MC sam|samH). Compare modern Mandarin 三 (sān), literary Hokkien 三 (sam), Cantonese 三 (saam¹).”
- “In Old Japanese, this kanji was used phonetically to transcribe さむ (samu).”
- “Borrowing from Mandarin 三 (sān), with the pitch accent different from etymology 1.”
Source: Wiktionary: 三 (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 三 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
み
- “⟨mi₁⟩ → /mi/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *mi.”
- “Likely an apophonic form of 六 (mu, “six”), compare 四 (yo, “four”) with 八 (ya, “eight”).”
みい
- “/mi/ → /miː/”
- “Shift from mi above.”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.