First opened Thursday, October 15, 2026
上
うえ
- flat (heiban)
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
above (up, top, etc.), over, on top of
Ue is from Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *upay, and is the unbound apophonic form of uwa.
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 上
In a sentence
石の上にも３年。
Patience wins out in the end.
その上に座るな。
Don't sit on it.
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.
- “⟨upe₂⟩ → /*upai̯/ → /upe/ → /ufe/ → /uwe/ → /ue/”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *upay.”
- “Unbound apophonic form of uwa, ancient upa (see below).”
Source: Wiktionary: 上 (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 上 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うえ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
うわ
- “/upa/ → /ufa/ → /uwa/”
- “From Old Japanese. The combining form of ue, ancient upe (see above).”
へ・え
- “⟨upe₂⟩ → ⟨pe₂⟩ → */pe/ → /fe/ → /he/ (→ /e/)”
- “Short-form of or shift from ue, ancient upe (see above). Realized as -e in some compounds.”
かみ
- “⟨kami₁⟩ → */kamʲi/ → /kami/”
- “From Old Japanese. Already apparent in ancient texts such as the Kojiki (c. 712 CE) and the Man'yōshū (c. 759 CE).”
- “Distinct from 神 (⟨kami₂⟩ → kami, “Shinto deity”).”
かん
- “/kami/ → /kamʉ/ → /kaɴ/”
- “Contraction of Old Japanese ⟨kami₁⟩. Spelled in ancient works as かむ (kamu) prior to the development of the ん (n) kana.”
じょう
- “/d͡ʑɨau/ → /d͡ʑɔː/ → /d͡ʑoː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 上 (MC dzyangX|dzyangH).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.