First opened Friday, November 4, 2011
津波
つなみ
- 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).
tsunami, tidal wave
Tsunami is 津 (tsu, “cove, inlet, outlet”) plus 波 (nami, “wave”), named so because tsunamis do more damage to sea ports.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
津波警報は解除された。
The tidal wave warning has been canceled.
沿岸地帯には津波警報が出た。
The coast was warned against a tsunami.
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.
- “Compound of 津(つ) (tsu, “cove, inlet, outlet”) + 波(なみ) (nami, “wave”). Named as such because tsunamis are more damaging to sea ports.”
- “Attested since at least the 甲(こう)陽(よう)軍(ぐん)鑑(かん) (Kōyō Gunkan) of the early 1600s.”
Source: Wiktionary: 津波 (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.