First opened Sunday, July 10, 2005
身
み
- 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).
body, main part
Mi, “body”, is from Proto-Japonic *muy and cognate with 実 (mi, “seed, fruit, offspring”).
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 身
In a sentence
結婚は身の枷。
Wedlock is a padlock.
芸は身を助く。
Accomplishments are a friend in need.
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.
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *muy. Cognate with 実 (mi, “seed, fruit, offspring”).”
- “Standalone form of mu below. See also the etymology of 神 (kami, kamu).”
- “Compare Korean 몸 (mom, “body”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 身 (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 身 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not み. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
む
- “From Old Japanese. Bound form of mi above, only found in compounds.”
むくろ
- “From Old Japanese. Compound of 身(む) (mu, “body”, bound form of standalone mi) + くろ (kuro). The derivation of the kuro element is uncertain, but it might be an alteration or ancient form of 幹(から) (kara, “trunk, main part”).”
しん
- “From Middle Chinese 身 (syin, “body, self”).”
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.