First opened Wednesday, February 3, 2010
土産
みやげ
- flat (heiban)
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).
souvenir
The kanji say “soil” and “produce”; the likely origin is a shrine's “small box”.
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
これは友人への土産です。
These are gifts for my friends.
旅行から帰るときの土産のことを考えておきなさい。
Make allowance for souvenirs on the return trip.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Probably a compound of 宮 (miya, “shrine”) + 笥 (ke, “small box”).”
- “The ke changes to ge as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 土産 (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 土産 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みやげ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
どさん・とさん
- “Superficially of 土(ど) (do, “land, ground”) + 産(さん) (san, “production, produce”).”
What the labels mean
- 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).
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.