First opened Wednesday, August 24, 2011
雛
ひな
- 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).
young bird, chick, doll
Hina appears to be from Old Japanese; a derived form, hiwina, appears in The Tale of Genji, dated before 1021.
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 雛
In a sentence
ひなを数えるな。
Don't count your chickens.
めん鳥がひなをかえしている。
The hen is hatching her chicks.
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.
- “*/pina/ → /fina/ → /hina/”
- Hedged“Appears to be from Old Japanese. The derivative form hiwina (later hīna) appears in The Tale of Genji, dated to before 1021.”
Source: Wiktionary: 雛 (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 雛 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひな. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひいな
- “*/pipina/ → */fifina/ → /fiwina/ → /hiːna/”
- “Possibly an alteration of a reduplicated form hinahina.”
ひよこ
- “*/pijoko/ → /fijoko/ → /hijoko/”
- “Compound of ひよ (piyo → hiyo, “onomatopoeia for the sound a chick makes”) + 子 (ko, “diminutive suffix”). Compare ぴよぴよ (piyopiyo, “tweet-tweet; cheep-cheep”) or peep.”
- “Possibly related to Middle Korean 비〮육 (píywùk), whence modern Korean 병아리 (byeong'ari, “chick”).”
ひよっこ
- “/hijoko/ → /hijokko/”
- “Alteration of hiyoko above. The geminate kk sound emphasizes the diminutiveness.”
すう
- “From Middle Chinese. Most reconstructions of the original Middle Chinese reading start with an affricate, so this Japanese reading may have come from a dialect; compare Hakka reading ts'u¹.”
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.