First opened Tuesday, November 16, 2010
窓
まど
- 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).
window
Mado may be 目 (ma, “eye”) plus 門 (to, “gate, opening”): an opening for looking through.
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 窓
In a sentence
窓を閉めて。
Close the window.
窓を開けて。
Open the window.
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. Compound of 目(ま) (ma, “eye”, ancient combining form of modern 目(め) (me)) + 門(と) (to, “gate, opening”), in reference to an opening for looking through.”
- Hedged“Alternatively, may be a compound of 間(ま) (ma, “gap”) + 門(と) (to, “gate, opening”).”
- “First cited in some references to a text from 794, and also found in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
- “The Microsoft Windows sense is a semantic loan from English Windows.”
Source: Wiktionary: 窓 (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
- 外来語 Loanword
- Words taken from a language other than Chinese, mostly European ones, usually written in katakana.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.