First opened Saturday, November 2, 2013
はい
はい
- 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).
yes
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
はいどうぞ。
Here it is.
はい痛いです。
Yes, it hurts.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation currently unknown, with various resources listing no etymology. Theories include:”
- Hedged“* Perhaps related to interjection は (ha, “yes”), which first appears in the early 1600s.”
- Hedged“* Alternatively, may perhaps from Sino-Japanese 拝 (hai), but this theory is not academically accepted.”
- “First cited as a general shout in the early 1600s (compare English hey), with the affirmative yes sense first cited to 1774.”
Source: Wiktionary: はい (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).
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.