First opened Sunday, February 14, 2010
刺身
さしみ
- tail-high (odaka): 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).
sliced raw fish
“Stuck flesh”: nobody is sure why a verb for sticking names sliced fish.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
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 刺(さ)し (sashi, “sticking into, sticking between; slicing”, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 刺(さ)す (sasu, “to stick into”)) + 身(み) (mi, “flesh, meat”). The use of the verb 刺(さ)す (sasu) here to mean slice is irregular, and may be due to the kill connotations of the verb 切(き)る (kiru, “to cut, to slice”) during the Muromachi period when the word sashimi first appears.”
Source: Wiktionary: 刺身 (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).
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.