First opened Friday, December 23, 2011
天
てん
- 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).
heaven, sky
Ten, “heaven”, is from Middle Chinese 天 (MC then, “sky; heavens”).
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 天
In a sentence
彼は天を仰いだ。
He looked up at the sky.
彼は天の助けを得た。
He got assistance from above.
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 天 (MC then, “sky; heavens”). Compare modern Mandarin reading tiān.”
Source: Wiktionary: 天 (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 天 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not てん. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あま
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *amay.”
- “A bound form only appearing in compounds. Compare the formation of 目 (ma, bound form in compounds) and 目 (me, standalone form), 手 (ta, bound form in compounds) and 手 (te, standalone form).”
あめ
- “⟨ame₂⟩ → */aməj/ → /ame/”
- “From Old Japanese as a sound shift from ama above. Compare 神 (kami, kan-, kamu-, “god”), 目 (me, ma-, “eye”), etc. Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *amay.”
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.