First opened Wednesday, April 7, 2010
味噌
みそ
- 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).
miso, bean paste
Vovin considers miso a borrowing from Koreanic — compare meju — and a 938 source calls it a “Korean sauce”.
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
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.
- “⟨mi₁so₁⟩ → /miso/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in Ritsuryō tax records from 738 CE, with the spelling 未醤.”
- Hedged“Possibly also attested with the spelling 末醤 on a mokkan (wooden tally stick) dated to the reign of Emperor Junnin during the years 758–764, although this might be a different word, as 未 and 末 are distinct characters with separate pronunciations and opposite meanings.”
- “Phonetically recorded as 美蘇 in the Wamyō Ruijushō of 938, but the commentary describes this as erroneously written as 未醤.”
- “Vovin considers it to be a borrowing from Koreanic, compare Modern Korean 메주 (meju) "brick of dried fermented soybeans." This is supported by the Ruijushō citing the Youshikangosho saying that it is a "Korean sauce".”
- “Cognate with Proto-Ryukyuan *miso. A Proto-Japonic *misV is sometimes reconstructed as the ancestor for both if Ryukyuan didn't borrow it directly from Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 味噌 (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
- 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.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.