First opened Wednesday, February 17, 2010
明日
あした
- 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).
tomorrow
“Tomorrow” was originally “next morning”, and the kanji came afterwards.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
明日は私の誕生日だ。
Tomorrow is my birthday.
彼はあした来るかな。
I wonder if he'll come tomorrow.
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.
- “Shift in meaning from 朝 (ashita, “next morning”), itself cognate with 朝 (asa, “morning”).”
- “The kanji spelling is from Chinese 明日 (míngrì).”
Source: Wiktionary: 明日 (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 明日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not あした. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
あす
- “From Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki (712 CE).”
- “Various theories exist regarding the ultimate derivation:”
- “* Possibly a shift from verb 明かす (akasu, “to pass”).”
- “*: */akasu/ → */akusu/ → /asu/”
- “* Possibly an apophonic form of or cognate with 朝 (asa, “morning”).”
- “The kanji spelling is an orthographic borrowing from Chinese 明日.”
みょうにち
- “/mʲau nʲiti/ → /mʲɔːɲit͡ɕi/ → /mʲoːɲit͡ɕi/”
- “From Middle Chinese compound 明日 (MC mjaeng nyit).”
めいじつ
- “From a later borrowing of Chinese 明日 (míngrì), using the 漢音 (kan'on, literally “Han sound”).”
- “Rare reading.”
What the labels mean
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.