First opened Saturday, November 4, 2006
岬
みさき
- flat (heiban)
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).
cape (on coast)
Misaki is attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720, analyzable as み (mi) plus 先 (saki, “tip, point; promontory”).
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 岬
In a sentence
その船は岬を回った。
The ship sailed around the cape.
船は岬に沿って回った。
The boat sailed around the promontory.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720.”
- “Analyzable as a compound of み (mi, see below) + 先(さき) (saki, “tip, point; promontory”).”
- Hedged“The mi prefix is likely the honorific prefix 御(み) (mi-), and the term misaki is attested explicitly with the spelling 御(み)碕(さき) (mi-saki) in the Nihon Shoki.”
- Hedged“Alternative theories as to the identity of the み (mi) include:”
- “* 水(み) (mi, “water”, bound prefix form of 水(みず) (mizu)), although the semantics this suggests may instead mean “water tip”, i.e. a jutting-out of water, not of land — an inlet.”
- “* Shift from 海(うみ) (umi, “sea”), with the same consideration as above.”
Source: Wiktionary: 岬 (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.