First opened Friday, August 19, 2005
真ん中
まんなか
- 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).
middle, center
Mannaka is 真ん (man-, “true, real, exactly”) plus 中 (naka, “center, middle”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
町の真ん中で火災が発生した。
A fire broke out in the middle of the city.
この石には、真ん中に穴がある。
This stone has a hole in the center.
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 真ん (man-, “true, real, exactly”) + 中 (naka, “center, middle”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 真ん中 (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).
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.