First opened Friday, July 7, 2006
神
かみ
- 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).
god
Kami, “god”, is not related to 上 (kami) or 髪 (kami), and comes from Proto-Japonic *kamui.
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 神
In a sentence
神は存在する。
God is.
正直者に神宿る。
Honesty is the best policy.
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.
- “⟨kami₂⟩ → */kamɨ/ → /kami/”
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kamui.”
- “Not related to 上 (kami₁ → kami, “top, upper”) or 髪 (kami, “hair”).”
- “Often appears in compounds as kamu- or kan-, indicating that kami is an unbound form deriving from */kamui/. Such apophony has occurred in other Japanese terms, such as 目 (me, ma-, “eye”) or 酒 (sake, saka-, “sake, liquor”). See also WT:AJPX#Standalone forms and combining forms.”
- “Compare Korean 검 (geom, “god, spirit”) and Ainu カムイ (kamuy, “god”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 神 (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 神 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
しん
- “From Middle Chinese 神 (MC zyin). Compare modern Mandarin 神 (shén).”
じん
- “From Middle Chinese 神 (MC zyin).”
み
- “⟨mi₁⟩ → */mʲi/ → /mi/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Cognate with 御 (mi-), an honorific prefix originally used to refer to gods and other high-status objects.”
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.