First opened Sunday, October 3, 2010
死ぬ
しぬ
- 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).
to die
Shinu has an irregular -nu ending shared only with the now-obsolete verb 往ぬ (inu).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 死
In a sentence
東京の郊外に住む両親や弟は大震災で死んだ。
My parents and little brother, who lived in the suburbs of Tokyo, died in the big earthquake.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *sin-. Appears in the oldest Japanese texts, including the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE and the Man'yōshū of 759 CE.”
- “The ぬ (-nu) ending historically had an irregular conjugation pattern, shared only by now-obsolete verb 往(い)ぬ, 去(い)ぬ (inu, “to go away, to go, to leave, to pass, to disappear”) and auxiliary verb ぬ (nu, indicating completion, generally reserved for non-intentional, spontaneous, or intransitive actions). The ぬ (-nu) in verb 死(し)ぬ (shinu) was viewed as identical to the auxiliary, and the verb 死(し)ぬ (shinu) initially was thus never conjugated with this auxiliary as an additional suffix.”
- Hedged“The auxiliary itself may have derived from the verb 往(い)ぬ, 去(い)ぬ (inu, “to go away, to go, to leave, to pass, to disappear”), raising the possibility that the verb 死(し)ぬ (shinu) may have derived from a fusion of 死(し) (shi, “death”) + 往(い)ぬ, 去(い)ぬ (inu, “to go away, to go, to leave, to pass, to disappear”); the second element could also be the auxiliary ぬ (-nu) or its suggested ancient stative verb origin.”
- “The transition from the ナ行(ぎょう)変(へん)格(かく)活(かつ)用(よう) (na-gyō henkaku katsuyō, “na-row irregular conjugation”) pattern to the regular 四(よ)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (yodan katsuyō, “quadrigrade conjugation”) appears in texts from the Muromachi period (1336–1573) and on. The na irregular pattern persisted in increasingly limited use until the Meiji period (1868–1929).”
Source: Wiktionary: 死ぬ (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).
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.