First opened Saturday, April 6, 2013
日向
ひなた
- flat (heiban)
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).
sunny place, in the sun
Hinata is 日 (hi, “sun”) plus な (na, Old Japanese possessive particle) plus た (ta, “direction, side”).
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
彼らはひなたでからだをかわかしていた。
They dried themselves in the sun.
ひなたに座っているのに、まだ寒気がした。
Even though I was sitting in the sun, I still felt chilly.
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 日 (hi, “sun”) + な (na, Old Japanese possessive particle) + た (ta, “direction, side”).”
- “The ta element is found in terms such as あなた (anata, “you”, originally “that side (distant)”), そなた (sonata, “you”, archaic; originally “that side (nearby)”).”
- “Other various nanori readings.”
Source: Wiktionary: 日向 (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 日向 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ひなた. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ひゅうが
- “⟨pi₁muka⟩ → */pʲimuka/ → /ɸimuka/ → /ɸiũɡa/ → /hjuːɡa/”
- “Shift from Old Japanese 日向 (Pi₁muka → Himuka).”
- “Equivalent to a compound of 日 (hi, “sun”) + 向か (muka, the 未然形 (mizenkei, “irrealis form”) of verb 向く (muku), “to face (a direction)”).”
ひるが
- “Unknown, possibly a sound change from Old Japanese 日向 (pi₁muka → himuka); however, the /-mu-/ → /-ɾ̠u-/ shift is unlikely.”
- “Alternatively, the spelling may be ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), with the hiru portion equating to 昼 (hiru, “daytime”), and the ga of uncertain derivation. Compare 春日 (Kasuga).”
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.