First opened Wednesday, February 1, 2012
眉
まゆ
- 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).
eyebrow
Mayu is a shift from the older reading まよ (mayo).
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 眉
In a sentence
彼は驚いてまゆをつりあげた。
He arched his eyebrows in surprise.
彼はまゆを上げて難色を示した。
He showed his disapproval by raising an eyebrow.
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.
- “/majo/ → /maju/”
- “A shift from older reading 眉(まよ) (mayo) below.”
Source: Wiktionary: 眉 (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 眉 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not まゆ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
まよ
- “From Old Japanese. Appears in the Man'yōshū poetry anthology of the mid-700s with the reading mayo. The ma element is very likely 目(ま) (ma, “eye”, ancient combining form of modern me reading), but the derivation of the yo element is unclear.”
まみ
- “The ma element is most likely 目(ま) (ma, “eye”, ancient combining form of modern me reading).”
び・み
- “From Middle Chinese 眉 (MC mij).”
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.