First opened Friday, November 12, 2010
声
こえ
- 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).
voice
Koe went kowe → koe from Proto-Japonic *kəwai, and its further derivation is unknown.
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 声
In a sentence
私たちは声を振り絞って助けを求めた。
We shouted for help at the tops of our voices.
彼女は声をおののかせて「助けて！」と叫んだ。
In a quivering voice she cried "Help!"
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.
- “⟨ko₂we⟩ → */kəwe/ → /kowe/ → /koe/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *kəwai.”
- Hedged“Further derivation unknown.”
Source: Wiktionary: 声 (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 声 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
せい
- “From Middle Chinese 聲 (MC syeng).”
しょう
- “/sjau/ → /ɕau/ → /ɕɔː/ → /ɕoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 聲 (MC syeng).”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.