First opened Monday, April 25, 2011
恋
こい
- 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).
love, tender passion
Koi went from kopi through kofi and kowi to koi, from the stem of 恋う (kou, “to love, yearn”).
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 恋
In a sentence
恋の味は苦い。
The taste of love is bitter.
彼女は恋に破れた。
She was disappointed in love.
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.
- “⟨ko₁pi₂⟩ → /kʷopʷɨ/ → /kofi/ → /kowi/ → /koi/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “From the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 恋(こ)う (kou, “to love, yearn”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 恋 (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
- 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.