First opened Tuesday, February 24, 2009
まさか
まさか
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
by no means
まさか is first attested in the Man'yōshū of 759, and the source lists several theories of its derivation.
Taken apart
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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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Man'yōshū, compiled 759 CE.”
- Hedged“There are various theories regarding the ultimate derivation:”
- “* Being the initial ma- is from 目 (ma, me, “eye”), it was thought to be an alteration of 目前 (mesaki, “before one's eyes”), with the me- element becoming ma-, but there was no attestation of masaki.”
- “* Compound of root 正 (masa, “exactly”, found in compounds such as まさに (masa ni, “certainly, exactly, without doubt”)) + か (ka, “special suffix indicating condition”).”
Source: Wiktionary: まさか (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.