First opened Sunday, December 19, 2010
心
こころ
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 3
- middle-high (nakadaka): 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).
heart, mind
Kokoro is first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kəkərə.
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 心
In a sentence
目は心の鏡。
The eye is the mirror of the soul.
心が動くね。
That sounds very tempting.
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.
- “⟨ko₂ko₂ro₂⟩ → */kəkərə/ → /kokoro/”
- “From Old Japanese 心 (ko₂ko₂ro₂), ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kəkərə. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Compare Okinawan 心 (kukuru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 心 (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 心 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こころ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
うら
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Cognate with 裏 (ura, “inside”) and 浦 (ura, “inlet”).”
しん
- “/simʉ/ → */ɕimʉ/ → /ɕiɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 心 (MC sim).”
- “The Buddhist sense is a translation of Pali and Sanskrit चित्त (citta).”
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.