First opened Friday, December 11, 2009
見事
みごと
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
splendid, magnificent
“Splendid” is “seeing” plus “thing”, first cited in 1309.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
見事な作品ですね。
It's an excellent composition.
君は見事にやってのけた。
You did an excellent job.
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.
- “Compound of 見 (mi, “seeing”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 見る (miru, “to see, to look at”)) + 事 (koto, “fact, event, abstract thing”).”
- “First cited to a text from 1309.”
Source: Wiktionary: 見事 (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 見事 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みごと. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みんごと
- “Shift from migoto, emphasizing the nasality of the voiced /ɡ/.”
- “* /miɡoto/ → /miŋoto/ → /miɴɡoto/”
- “Appears in a text from 1706.”
けんじ
- “Considering the date of first appearance and the apparent lack of any Chinese term 見事 /见事, this is probably a shift in reading from the native-derived kun'yomi of migoto to the Chinese-derived on'yomi of kenji, possibly to impart a higher register. Compare usage patterns in English for Germanic-derived terms (often considered lower-register) and their Latinate synonyms (often considered higher-register).”
- “First cited to a text from the 1370s.”
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).