First opened Tuesday, November 22, 2005
明後日
あさって
- 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).
day after tomorrow
Asatte shifted from asate, and the kanji spelling comes from myōgonichi.
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.
In a sentence
あさって来てください。
Come the day after tomorrow.
あさってはトムの誕生日だ。
The day after tomorrow is Tom's birthday.
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.
- “/asate/ → /asat̚te/”
- “Shift from earlier asate (see Etymology 2 below).”
- “The kanji spelling is from myōgonichi (see Etymology 3 below).”
Source: Wiktionary: 明後日 (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 明後日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あさって. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あさて
- “/asu sarite/ → /asːarʉte/ → /asate/”
- “Apparently recorded in the 名語記 (Myōgoki) etymology dictionary of 1263 as a shift from asusate, in turn from 明日去りて (asu sarite), itself a compound of 明日 (asu, “tomorrow”) + 去りて (sarite, modern 去って (satte), the conjunctive form of 去る (saru), “to pass”).”
- “The kanji spelling is from myōgonichi (see Etymology 3).”
みょうごにち
- “From 明後 (myōgo-, “the ... after next ...”) + 日 (nichi, “day”).”
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.