First opened Monday, October 22, 2007
飯
めし
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
meals, food
Meshi is the continuative stem of 召す (mesu, “to call; to eat”).
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 飯
In a sentence
一週間メシ抜きだったよ。
I went without food for a week.
とにかくメシ・・・といきたいところだが、その前に用を足すことにした。
Anyhow, lunch ... is where I wanted to go but I decided to go to the toilet first.
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.
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of verb 召す (mesu, “to call; to eat”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 飯 (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 飯 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not めし. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
はん
- “From Middle Chinese [Term?] 飯 (MC bjonX|bjonH).”
いい
- “⟨ipi₁⟩ → */ipʲi/ → /ifi/ → /iwi/ → /iː/”
- “From Old Japanese, ultimately from Proto-Japonic *ipi.”
- “Also used as 借音 (shakuon) kana for ⟨pi₁⟩.”
まま
- “Likely a shift from 旨旨(うまうま) (umauma, “food”, baby talk).”
まんま・まま
- “Compare Korean 맘마 (mamma) and dialectal 飯 (mama).”
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.