First opened Sunday, January 3, 2010
未来
みらい
- 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).
future (life tense)
“The future” began as a Buddhist calque of a Sanskrit phrase for “not yet come”.
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
彼の未来はばら色だ。
He has a bright future.
あなたの未来に乾杯！
To your future!
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.
- “From Middle Chinese 未來 (MC mj+jH loj). Originally a Buddhist calque of Sanskrit अनागत (anāgata, “not yet come; future”, past participle), from अन्- (an-, “not”) + आगत (āgata, “what has come”), from the verb root आगम् (āgam, “to come”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 未来 (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 未来 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みらい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みく
- “Compound of 未 (mi, the on'yomi or Chinese-derived reading) + 来 (ku, the kun'yomi or native Japanese reading).”
みくる
- “Compound of 未 (mi, the on'yomi or Chinese-derived reading) + 来る (kuru, the kun'yomi or native Japanese reading).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Made in Japan
- Coined in Japan from foreign material (wasei-kango, wasei-eigo), not borrowed whole.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.