First opened Friday, July 31, 2009
三日
みっか
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.
three days, third day of the month
“Three days” grew out of an earlier “mika”, with a tensed sound added.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
切符は三日間有効だ。
The ticket holds good for three days.
三日続きの雨だった。
It rained three days on end.
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.
- “Tensening of earlier 三日 (mika); by surface analysis, 三 (mi, “three”) + 日 (-ka, “days”, counter for days).”
Source: Wiktionary: 三日 (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 三日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みっか. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みか
- “Compound of 三(み) (mi, “three”) + 日(か) (-ka, “days”, counter for days).”
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.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.