First opened Thursday, October 21, 2010
水
みず
- 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).
water
Mizu is possibly cognate with 瑞 (mizu, “freshness, youth”).
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 水
In a sentence
水が欲しい。
I want some water.
蛙の面に水。
Like water off a duck's back.
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.
- “⟨mi₁du⟩ → */mʲidu/ → /mid͡zu/ → /mizu/”
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. In turn, from Proto-Japonic *mentu. Ryukyuan cognates support the existence of the first vowel having an initial mid vowel.”
- Hedged“Possibly cognate with 瑞 (mizu, “freshness, youth”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 水 (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 水 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みず. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
み
- “⟨mi₁⟩ → */mʲi/ → /mi/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- “Typically found in compounds.”
すい
- “/ɕuwi/ → */suwi/ → /sui/”
- “From Middle Chinese 水 (MC sywijX).”
- “Compare modern Mandarin 水 (shuǐ), modern Hakka 水 (súi).”
もい
- “⟨mopi₁⟩ → */mopʲi/ → /moɸi/ → /mowi/ → /moi/”
- “From Old Japanese. Via metonymy from the word 椀, 盌 (moi, “bowl”), from the meaning of “that which goes in the 椀, 盌 (moi, “bowl”)”. Compare the development of modern English cuppa, where the word for the container is similarly used to refer to the contents.”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.