First opened Friday, August 31, 2012
団扇
うちわ
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
fan
Uchiwa is 打ち (uchi, “hitting; batting”) plus 羽 (wa, “wing”), and its kanji are an example of jukujikun.
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.
In a sentence
ちなみに、この部屋には冷房設備なんて物は何も無い。あるのはうちわだけ。
Incidentally, this room doesn't have anything like an air conditioner. All it has is a hand-held paper fan.
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.
- “Compound of 打(う)ち (uchi, “hitting; batting”, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 打(う)つ (utsu, “to hit, to bat”)) + 羽(わ) (wa, “wing”). The kanji are an example of jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 団扇 (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 団扇 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うちわ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
だんせん
- “Probably from Middle Chinese compound 團扇 /团扇 (dhuɑn syenᴴ, literally “circle fan”). Compare modern Mandarin 團扇／团扇 (tuánshàn).”
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.