First opened Wednesday, January 26, 2011
辺
へん
- 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).
area, vicinity
Hen went /pen/ → /fen/ → /hen/, from Middle Chinese 邊 (“edge; margin, border; nearby”).
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 辺
In a sentence
この辺だと思います。
I think it's around here.
正方形には四つの辺がある。
A square has four sides.
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.
- “/pen/ → /fen/ → /hen/”
- “From Middle Chinese 邊 (MC pen, “edge; margin, border; nearby, vicinity”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 辺 (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 辺 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not へん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
へ
- “/pe₁/ → /pe/ → /fe/ → /he/”
- “From Old Japanese. The root of the modern Japanese directional particle へ (e).”
べ
- “/pe₁/ → /pe/ → /be/”
- “From Old Japanese, from pe above. The he changes to be as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
へた
- “From Old Japanese. Originally a compound of 辺 (he, “vicinity”, see he above) + た (ta, “place, area”, the same ta element in 貴方 anata, now “you” in modern Japanese but previously meaning “that one over there”).”
へち
- “From at least the late Heian period. Originally a compound of 辺 (he, “vicinity”, see he above) + ち (chi, “area?”, the same chi element used to indicate general area in こち kochi, “around here, this area” and related words).”
なべ
- “Appears to be a compound of な (na, alternative form of の no, the possessive particle) + 辺 (be, “vicinity”, see be above).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.