First opened Tuesday, October 13, 2009
明明後日
しあさって
- 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).
two days after tomorrow
Three days out has its own word, and nobody is sure what its first syllable is.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
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.
- Hedged“Compound of し (shi, of uncertain derivation) + 明後日 (asatte, “the day after tomorrow”).”
- Hedged“The initial shi element is uncertain. Speculatively, this might be related to, or a shift from, intensifying prefix ひ (hi) found in some adjectives, such as ひ弱(よわ)い (hiyowai, “delicate, very weak”).”
- “First cited to a text from 1275.”
Source: Wiktionary: 明明後日 (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 明明後日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not しあさって. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みょうみょうごにち
- “Compound of 明 (myō, “next, one later”) + 明後日 (myōgonichi, “day after tomorrow”).”
- “First cited to the Nippo Jisho of 1603.”
What the labels mean
- 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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.