First opened Thursday, September 8, 2005
今日
こんにち
- 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).
today, this day
Konnichi is from Middle Chinese 今日, the goon reading, so likely the original borrowing.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
今日ますます多くの人が、都会より田舎の生活を好むようになっています。
Nowadays more and more people prefer country life to city life.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Middle Chinese compound 今日 (MC kim nyit). Compare modern Taishanese reading gim¹ ngit⁴.”
- Hedged“The goon, so likely the original reading of the term as first borrowed from Middle Chinese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 今日 (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 今日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not こんにち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こんち
- “/koɲɲit͡ɕi/ → /koɲt͡ɕi/”
- “Shift from konnichi above. Used dialectally in the Shitamachi area of Tokyo since the Edo period.”
こんじつ
- “From Middle Chinese 今日 (MC kim nyit). Compare modern Cantonese reading gam¹ jat⁶.”
- “Change in reading from konnichi, keeping the earlier goon reading kon for 今, but substituting the later kan'on reading jitsu for 日.”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.