First opened Sunday, December 4, 2011
刃
は
- 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).
blade, sword
Ha, “blade”, is from Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pa, and is cognate with 歯 (ha, “tooth”).
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 刃
In a sentence
そのナイフは刃が鋭い。
The knife has a very sharp edge.
刃の鋭いナイフを手に入れた。
I've got a keen-edged knife.
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.
- “/pa/ → /ɸa/ → /ha/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *pa.”
- Hedged“Cognate with 歯 (ha, “tooth”). Possibly also related to 葉 (ha, “leaf”), but the pitch accents do not match. Compare English blade, which also meant “leaf”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 刃 (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 刃 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not は. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
やいば
- “/jaki ɸa/ → /jakiba/ → /jaĩba/ → /jaiba/”
- “イ音便(おんびん) (i-onbin) form of 焼き刃 (yakiba), a compound of 焼き (yaki, “burned, fired”) + 刃 (ha, “edge, blade”, see above). The ha changes to ba as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “Compare to つけやきば (tsukeyakiba), where the ki does not undergo the same euphonic change.”
- “First attested in the Taiheiki of the late 1300s.”
じん
- “From Middle Chinese 刃 (MC nyinH).”
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.