First opened Monday, October 24, 2005
境
さかい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
border, boundary, mental state
Sakai, “border”, is the stem of the obsolete verb 境う (sakau, “to divide, to form a boundary between things”).
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 境
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.
- “/sakapi/ → /sakaɸi/ → /sakahi/ → /sakai/”
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of obsolete verb 境う (sakau, “to divide, to form a boundary between things”).”
- “Some sources further derive the verb as Old Japanese element 境 (saka, “division, border, boundary”) + auxiliary verb ふ (fu) indicating repetition or ongoing state. However, given the semantics, this could also be analyzed as the repetitive or ongoing aspect of Old Japanese-derived verb saku with an underlying meaning of “to split apart, to separate, to put distance between”, spelled variously as 割(さ)く, 裂(さ)く, 離(さ)く, or 放(さ)く, and cognate with 咲(さ)く (saku, “to bloom”, from the idea of the blooms splitting open), 栄(さか)える (sakaeru, “to prosper”, extended from the bloom sense), and 盛(さか)る (sakaru, “to be in prime condition, to prosper, to flourish”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 境 (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 境 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さかい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
きょう
- “From Middle Chinese 境 (MC kjaengX).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.