First opened Tuesday, September 21, 2010
大きな
おおきな
- 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).
big
Ōkina is the na-adjective form of 大きい, appearing from the Muromachi period.
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 大
In a sentence
大きな音をたてた。
It rang loudly.
大きな輪を描こうよ。
Let's make a big circle.
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.
- “/opoki/ → /oɸoki/ → /oɸoki na/ → /owoki na/ → /oːki na/”
- “Appears starting from the Muromachi period (室(むろ)町(まち)時(じ)代(だい) (Muromachi jidai), c. 1336–1573).”
- “Derived as the -na adjective construction of -i adjective 大(おお)きい (ōkii, “big, great”), which see for more.”
Source: Wiktionary: 大きな (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 大きな on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not おおきな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
おっきな
- “/oːkina/ → /okːina/”
- “Sound shift from ōkina. First attested in popular literature of the early 1800s.”
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.