First opened Monday, June 27, 2011
都
と
- 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).
metropolitan
To, “metropolitan”, is from Middle Chinese 都 (MC tu).
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 都
In a sentence
都庁舎に行き、そこでまた列の中で待った。
The woman left and went to the courthouse, where she waited in line again.
「都庁舎でもらえますよ」と係員が付け加えた。
"You can get it at the Metropolitan Government Office," the clerk added.
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 Middle Chinese 都 (MC tu).”
Source: Wiktionary: 都 (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 都 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not と. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みやこ
- “⟨mi₁yako₁⟩ → */mʲijakʷo/ → /mijako/”
- “From Old Japanese, a compound of 宮(みや) (miya, “imperial palace”) + 処(こ) (ko, “place”).”
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.