First opened Tuesday, March 23, 2010
町
まち
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
town; city
Machi first meant a “plot of land”, and Vovin argues it was borrowed from a Korean ancestor word for “field”.
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.
Written with 町
In a sentence
町は眠っていた。
The town slept.
悲劇が町を襲った。
Tragedy fell over the town.
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“From Old Japanese, with the original meaning of “plot of land”. Vovin argues it is likely borrowed from an ancestor to Middle Korean 맡 (math, “field”) , but all Japanese etymological theories base the etymology on the meaning of “town; section of a castle town”, typically using 道(ち) (chi), 道(みち) (michi, “road”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 町 (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 町 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not まち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
ちょう
- “From Middle Chinese 町 (MC thengX).”
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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.