First opened Monday, June 13, 2011
密か
ひそか
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
- 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).
secret, private, surreptitious
Hisoka goes back to Old Japanese and Proto-Japonic.
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 密
In a sentence
彼は密かに庭に入り込んだ。
He entered the garden secretly.
彼女は密かに彼の失敗を笑った。
She laughed up her sleeve at his failure.
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, from Proto-Japonic *pisǝka.https://starlingdb.org/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\alt\japet&first=1101”
Source: Wiktionary: 密か (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.