First opened Wednesday, March 13, 2013
矢
や
- 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).
arrow
Ya, “arrow”, is from Old Japanese and is found in the Kojiki of 712 CE.
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 矢
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 Old Japanese. Found in the Kojiki of 712 CE, and in the Man'yōshū completed some time after 759 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 矢 (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 矢 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not や. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さ
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE.”
- “Possibly cognate with Old Japanese-derived 幸 (sachi, “a hunting implement”) and Korean 살 (sal, “arrow”).”
- “This reading does not appear to be used in modern Japanese.”
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.