First opened Wednesday, January 2, 2008
短い
みじかい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
short (length)
Mijikai was mizikasi in Old Japanese, first attested in c. 759 in the Man'yōshū; its constituent parts remain obscure.
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 短
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨mi₁zikasi⟩ → /mizikasi/ → /mid͡ʑikaɕi/ → /mid͡ʑikaki/ → /mid͡ʑikai/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “First attested in c. 759 CE, in the Man'yōshū.”
- Hedged“Appears to be derived as a compound, but the constituent parts remain obscure. The stem みじか (mijika) is also found in compounds, and in the now-obsolete adjective forms 短(みじか)やか (mijikayaka) and 短(みじか)らか (mijikaraka), indicating that the か (ka) is not the adjectivizing suffix か (-ka) (as in 静(しず)か (shizuka)), but rather part of the root.”
Source: Wiktionary: 短い (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).
Other readings of 短い on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みじかい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みちかい
- “Shift from standard みじかい (mijikai).”
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.