港

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 港

In a sentence

• 船(ふね)は港(みなと)に着(つ)いた。

  The ships reached port.

  Tatoeba #141127, translation #273445

• その船(ふね)は今(いま)港(みなと)にいる。

  The ship is now in the harbor.

  Tatoeba #208425, translation #45683

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.

• “From Old Japanese. Attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720. Reconstructed as deriving from Proto-Japonic *minato.”
• “The traditional etymology that Japanese sources trace back to is a compound of 水 (mi-, “water”) + な (na, assimilated apophonic form of の (no, “genitive case marker”)) + 門 (to, “gate”).”
• Hedged“* However, this does not correlate cleanly with the etymology of 水 (mizu, “water”), reconstructed as Proto-Japonic *mentu (“water”). Then again, there are numerous attested words where 水 (mi) is used as the first and last element in compounds, suggesting either that the derivation of 水 (mizu) might differ.”
• Hedged“Vovin, on the other hand suggests that the initial mi- was 御 (mi-, “honorific prefix”), while -na- meant "water", possibly from Proto-Tai *C̬.namꟲ (“water”). Compare 涙 (namida, “tears”), 菜葱, 水葱 (nagi, “Monochoria vaginalis”), 漬く (nazuku, “soak in water”, obsolete).”
• “* However, this may present semantic difficulties, as any native formation like namida that proposes "water" for the initial nam and "eye" for a following component reverses the usual word-formation pattern for Japanese, where the main or head noun comes last. In addition, the na element appears in other words with no relation to "water", as an assimilated apophonic form of genitive particle の (no), seen in terms such as 掌 (tanagokoro, “palm of the hand”, literally “hand's heart/center”), 眼間 (manakai, “where the lines of sight of the eyes converge”, literally “eyes' exchanging/crossing”).”

Source: Wiktionary: 港 (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.