First opened Tuesday, August 16, 2005
最中
さいちゅう
- 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).
in the middle of
Saichū, “in the middle of”, is 最 (sai-, “most”) plus 中 (chū, “middle”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は遊びの最中です。
He is at play.
お話の最中にすみません。
May I interrupt?
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 最(さい) (sai-, “most”) + 中(ちゅう) (chū, “middle”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 最中 (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 最中 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さいちゅう. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さなか
- “From 最(さい) (sai-, “most”) + 中(なか) (naka, “inside, middle”).”
もなか
- “From 最(も) (mo-, “most, true”) + 中(なか) (naka, “inside”).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.