First opened Thursday, September 23, 2010
目
め
- 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).
eye(s)
Me is probably cognate with 見る (miru, “to see”), and may also be cognate with 芽 (me, “bud, shoot”).
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 目
In a sentence
目は心の鏡。
The eye is the mirror of the soul.
目が痛いです。
My eyes are sore.
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.
- “⟨me₂⟩ → */məɨ/ → /me/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *mai. Cognate with 目(ま) (ma, bound form). Now the modern Japanese term for eye.”
- Hedged“Probably cognate with 見(み)る (miru, “to see, to look”).”
- Hedged“May also be cognate with 芽(め) (me, “bud, shoot”), perhaps from the “visually prominent feature” sense, and with suppositional / volitional verb suffix む (mu) (presenting in modern Japanese verb conjugations as the -ō or -yō endings), perhaps from the “seem like, look like” sense.”
Source: Wiktionary: 目 (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 目 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not め. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もく
- “From Middle Chinese 目 (MC mjuwk). Compare modern Cantonese 目 (muk₆) and Wu 目 (moq).”
ぼく
- “From Middle Chinese 目 (MC mjuwk). Compare modern Min Nan 目 (bo̍k).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.