First opened Monday, October 31, 2005
島
しま
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
island
Shima, “island”, is possibly related to Baekje 斯麻 (*syema, “island”) and Middle Korean 셤 (syem).
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 島
In a sentence
島が見えてきた。
An island came in sight.
遠くに島が見えた。
We saw an island in the distance.
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.
- “/sima/ → /ɕima/”
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *sima.”
- Hedged“Possibly related to Baekje 斯麻 (*syema, “island”) and Middle Korean 셤 (syem), whence modern Korean 섬 (seom, “island”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 島 (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 島 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
とう
- “/tau/ → /tɔː/ → /toː/”
- “From Middle Chinese 島 (MC tawX).”
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.