First opened Monday, May 24, 2010
海
うみ
- 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).
sea, beach
Umi is theorized to be 大 (ō-, “big”) plus 水 (mi, “water”), though the source finds that problematic.
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 海
In a sentence
うみできれいな貝がらをひろった。
I picked up a pretty shell at the seaside.
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.
- “⟨umi₁⟩ → */umij/ → /umi/”
- “From Old Japanese, theorized as descending from Proto-Japonic *omi.”
- Hedged“Has been thought to have been derived from a compound. There are two leading theories regarding the ultimate derivation:”
- “* Shift from 大 (ō-, “big, great”) + 水 (mi, “water”, combining form).”
- “: This is problematic phonetically because there is no known term having a related shift from /opo/ → /oː/ → /o/ → /u/, and semantically as there already exists a compound 大水 (ōmizu, “flood”).”
- “* From う (u-, stem indicating “ocean”) + 水 (mi, “water”, combining form). The u- stem is evident in 魚 (uo, “fish”) and 潮 (ushio, “salt water; tide”), and in the 海 (una) element in various ancient terms (see below).”
Source: Wiktionary: 海 (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 海 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not うみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
うな
- “From Old Japanese. Thought to be comprised of う (u-, stem indicating “ocean”) + な (na, ancient alternative form of the possessive particle の (no)). The u- stem is also evident in 魚 (uo, “fish”) and 潮 (ushio, “salt water; tide”).”
- “First cited to the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
わた
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Probably related to Korean 바다 (bada, “ocean, sea”); perhaps an ancient Koreanic borrowing into Japanese. Other theories include a connection to 遠 (woti → ochi, woto → oto, “distant place”) or to 渡る (wataru, “to cross, to ford”).”
- “Also read as wada.”
み
- “Either cognate with 水 (mi, “water”), or an abbreviation of umi above.”
かい
- “From Middle Chinese 海 (MC xojX).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.