First opened Monday, February 14, 2011
南
みなみ
- 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).
South
Minami is Old Japanese 南 (mi1nami1).
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 南
In a sentence
風は南へ吹く。
The wind blows south.
鳥は南へ飛んで行った。
The birds flew to the south.
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.
- “⟨mi₁nami₁⟩ → */mʲinamʲɨ/ → /minami/”
- “From Old Japanese 南 (mi₁nami₁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 南 (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 南 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not みなみ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みんなみ
- “/minami/ → /minːami/”
- “Appears in The Pillow Book, completed in 1002.”
- “Alteration of minami.”
なん
- “/namʉ/ → /naɴ/”
- “From Middle Chinese 南 (MC nom).”
なん
- “From Mandarin 南 (nán).”
みなん
- “Shift from standard Japanese minami, dropping the final vowel and keeping the nasal.”
- “* /minami/ → /minaɴ/”
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.