First opened Tuesday, October 26, 2010
年
とし
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
year, age
Toshi originally referred to grain, particularly rice, and by extension the year's harvest.
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 年
In a sentence
よいお年を。
Happy New Year!
もう年だよ。
I feel my age.
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.
- “⟨to₂si⟩ → /tosi/ → /toɕi/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *təsi. Originally referred to grain, particularly rice, and by extension, the year's harvest.”
Source: Wiktionary: 年 (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 年 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not とし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ねん
- “From Middle Chinese 年 (nen, “year”). Compare modern Mandarin reading nián, Hakka ngièn, Cantonese nin⁴.”
とせ
- “/to₂se/ → /tose/”
- “From Old Japanese. Likely a shift in pronunciation from 年(とし) (toshi).”
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.