First opened Tuesday, October 13, 2026
後
あと
- 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).
afterwards (later); in the future; the rest; since then
Ato is an extension of 跡 (ato, “footprint; leftover”), itself a compound of 足 (a, “foot”) plus 所 (to, “place”).
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 後
In a sentence
後をつけろ。
Shadow him.
後は任せた！
The rest is left to you!
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.
- “Originally an extension of 跡(あと) (ato, “footprint; leftover”), itself a compound of 足(あ) (a, “foot”) + 所(と) (to, “place”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 後 (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 後 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しりえ
- “/siripe/ → /çirife/ → /çirie/”
- “From Old Japanese. Found in the Nihon Shoki of 720, and phonetically as 志利弊 (siripe₁) in the Man'yōshū of 759.”
- “Compound of 尻 (shiri, “butt, tail, rear”) + 方 (e, “side, facing, way, direction”).”
のち
- “From Old Japanese. Ultimate derivation unknown.”
ゆり
- “From Old Japanese. Ultimate derivation unknown. May be cognate with より (yori, “from; after”).”
ご
- “From Middle Chinese 後 (huwX, huwH, “after”).”
こう
- “From Middle Chinese 後 (huwX, “after”). Classified as the kan'on, so likely a later borrowing. Compare modern Mandarin reading hòu.”
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.