First opened Sunday, August 15, 2010
同じ
おなじ
- 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).
same, identical
Onaji is irregular even in Classical Japanese, mixing -i adjective and -na adjective behavior.
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 同
In a sentence
おなじ間違いを繰り返すな。
Don't make the same mistake again.
始まりがうまければ半ばうまくいったもおなじ。
Well begun is half done.
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.
- “⟨onazi⟩ → /onaʑi/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “An irregular adjective even in Classical Japanese (where the attributive form was usually 同じ), it has become more irregular in the modern language, mixing attributes of -i adjectives and -na adjectives (and sometimes neither).”
Source: Wiktionary: 同じ (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 同じ on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おなじ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おんなじ
- “/onaʑi/ → /onːaʑi/”
- “Long-pronounced form of onaji above.”
- “Compare 南 (minami → minnami, “south”).”
どうじ
- “The 未(み)然(ぜん)形(けい) (mizenkei, “irrealis”) and 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative”) form of two verb forms of the Sino-Xenic morpheme 同(どう) (dō, “same”).”
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.