うまい

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

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.

• “From Early Middle Japanese adjective うまし (umashi), with the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “predicative form”) ending in し (shi) first replaced with the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) ending in き (ki), and then with the medial /-k-/ falling out to result in an ending of い (i). From Old Japanese. Found in the Man'yōshū, completed some time after 759 CE. Sometimes reconstructed as Proto-Japonic *uma.”
• Hedged“The ultimate derivation remains unclear. The term occasionally appears in texts from the Heian period (794–1185 CE) with the phonetic spelling mumashi (in the classical terminal form), suggesting a possible pronunciation of */mmasi/ with an emphasized initial /mm/ sound, similar to the reconstructed readings for 馬 (*mma, “horse”) and 梅 (*mme, “plum”). The resulting reconstructed adjective stem of *mma- could indicate a derivation from onomatopoeia; compare English mmm as an expression of approval for something tasty.”
• Hedged“Alternatively, umai is listed in some sources as perhaps deriving from verb 熟む (umu, “to ripen, to become ripe”). There is a derived compound term where the meaning is clearly from the adjective, and the spelling uses the 熟 kanji from the verb. However, the verb does not appear in historical sources with an emphatic initial /mm/, and it seems to be cognate with 膿む (umu, “to fester, to fill with pus, to produce pus”, intransitive), possibly also with 生む, 産む (umu, “to bear, to give birth to; to produce”, transitive).”
• “Reconstructed by Samuel Martin as Proto-Japonic *ma-. Compare Okinawan cognate まーさん (māsan).”

Source: Wiktionary: うまい (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).

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.

Compound

Two or more words or stems joined into one.

Derivation

A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.

Origin unclear

Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.