First opened Wednesday, September 28, 2005
涙
なみだ
- 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).
tear
Namida is attested as namita in the Nihon Shoki, and later the Man'yōshū has the ta replaced by da.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 涙
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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 Old Japanese. Ultimately from Proto-Japonic *namita.”
- “Attested in the Nihon Shoki with the man'yōgana spelling 那(な)瀰(み)多(た) (namita). The Kojiki and Man'yōshū have 那(な)美(み)多(た) (namita), and the Man'yōshū also has later instances where the 多(た) (ta) was replaced with 太(だ) (da), forming 奈(な)美(み)太(だ) (namida), indicating a phonetic change over time from namita to namida.”
- Hedged“Ultimate derivation unknown. There are interesting phonetic and semantic similarities with Thai น้ำตา (nám-dtaa, “tear”, literally “water + eye”), overlapping semantically with Korean 눈물 (nunmul, “tear”, literally “eye + water”), perhaps pointing to an ancient prehistoric borrowing. Alexander Vovin lists it among "naturalized loanwords from Korean". However, such similarities may also be purely accidental.”
Source: Wiktionary: 涙 (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 涙 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not なみだ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
なんだ
- “/namida/ → /nanda/”
- “Alteration of namida above.”
なだ
- “Alteration of namida or nanda above. Used during the Edo period in the rough informal speech used by the staff and servants of samurai households, and others of lower social rank.”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.