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First opened Friday, May 21, 2010

向こう

むこう

  • middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
  • 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).

beyond, over there

JLPT N5Commonnoun (common) (futsuumeishi)和語 · Native JapaneseDerivation

Mukō has two possible sources, both from a nominalization of the verb 向かう (mukau, “to face”).

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 向

In a sentence

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.

  • “Two possible sources:”
  • “* From a nominalization of the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “terminal form”) or 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) of the verb 向(む)かう (mukau, “to face”). The modern pronunciation would suggest that the morpheme boundary in the original verb muka.u has been lost.”
  • “* From a nominalization of the ウ音(おん)便(びん) (u-onbin, “u euphonic change”) form of 向(む)かい (mukai, the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 向(む)かう (mukau, “to face”)), compare dialectal forms like 向(む)こうて (mukōte).”
  • “Accordingly, the historical kana spellings should be むかふ (mukafu) according to the former, and むかう (mukau) according to the latter. Compare 相撲(すもう) (sumō), of similar derivation.”

Source: Wiktionary: 向こう (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.
Derivation
A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.

Also read むこう

Other words so far with exactly this reading and another spelling, oldest first, with the pitch accent each entry shows: where they differ, the pitch tells the words apart in speech. Only the readings are compared; nothing is claimed about how the words are related.

  • 向こうThis word

    beyond, over there

    むこ↓う middle-high (nakadaka); むこう flat (heiban)

  • 無効

    invalid, no effect, unavailable

    むこう flat (heiban)

More like this

Other words so far that share a part, a process or a layer with this one, closest first. Each tag says what is shared; nothing here is a claim beyond what the entries already show.

Also opened on May 21

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

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Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it