First opened Friday, May 13, 2011
日
ひ
- 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).
sun, sunshine, day
Hi, “day”, comes from Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pi (“day”).
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 日
In a sentence
美しい日です。
It's a beautiful day.
日は西に沈む。
The sun sets in the west.
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.
- “⟨pi₁⟩ → */pʲi/ → /ɸi/ → /hi/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pi (“day”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 日 (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 日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
にち
- “/nʲitɨ/ → /nit͡ɕi/”
- “From Middle Chinese 日 (MC nyit).”
じつ
- “/d͡ʑitʉ/ → /d͡ʑit͡su/ → /ʑit͡su/”
- “From Middle Chinese 日 (MC nyit). Compare modern Min Nan 日 (ji̍t).”
か
- “From Old Japanese. The forms of words created using this suffix may be evidence for an earlier *uka form, see 二日(ふつか) (futsuka), 四日(ようか) (youka, modern form 四日(よっか) (yokka)), 六日(むゆか) (muyuka, modern form 六日(むいか) (muika)), 七日(なぬか) (nanuka, modern form 七日(なのか) (nanoka)), 八日(やうか) (yauka, modern form 八日(ようか) (yōka)), 九日(ここぬか) (kokonuka, modern form 九日(ここのか) (kokonoka)), and 二十日(はつか) (hatsuka) (two, four, six, seven, eight, nine, and twenty days, respectively).”
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.