First opened Saturday, May 29, 2010
今
いま
- 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).
now
Ima is first attested in the Kojiki, and one proposal splits it into i (“this”) plus ma.
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 今
In a sentence
今は忙しい。
I'm busy at the moment.
今しかない。
It's now or never.
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.
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. From Proto-Japonic *ima. Frellesvig suggests a compound of reconstructed proximal demonstrative *i (compare Middle Korean 이 (i, “this”)) + ma (corresponding to modern 間(ま) (ma, “space”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 今 (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 今 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いま. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こん
- “From Middle Chinese 今 (MC kim).”
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.