First opened Friday, July 16, 2010
昔
むかし
- 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).
old days; past
Mukashi is muka, from the verb 向く (muku, “to face opposite”), plus a direction suffix し (shi): “that which stands opposite from the present”.
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 昔
In a sentence
昔、地球は平らなものだと考えられていた。
It used to be thought that the earth was flat.
２つの土手の間に、むかし橋がかかっていた。
There used to be a bridge between two river banks.
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. The muka portion derives from the 未然形 (mizenkei, “incomplete form”) of verb 向く (muku, “to face opposite to something”), implying “that which stands opposite from the present”. The shi portion is suffix し (shi) indicating direction, also found in words 縦し (tatashi, “the standing or vertical direction”), 横し (yokoshi, “the sideways or horizontal direction”). This appears to be a somewhat rare alternative form, more commonly encountered as さ (sa), and may be cognate with the nominalizing adjective ending さ (sa).”
Source: Wiktionary: 昔 (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.