First opened Monday, March 19, 2012
婿
むこ
- 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).
son-in-law
Muko is found in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE with the spelling 聟, and may be from Proto-Japonic *moko.
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 婿
In a sentence
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
- “*/moko/ → *⟨muko₁⟩ → */mukʷo/*⟨mo₍₁₎ko₁⟩ → */mʷokʷo/ → /muko/”
- “Found in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE with the ideographic spelling 聟.”
- Hedged“Although the reading muko is not confirmed in Old Japanese documents, the presence of cognate words suggests that this may be from Proto-Japonic *moko (cognate with Okinawan 婿 (mūku), Kunigami 婿 (mufu), Miyako 婿 (muku) and the moko below). This would be the a result of a phonological change, whereby non-final */o/ in Proto-Japonic nouns shifted to become /u/ in Central Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“In regard to the derivation, there are some theories proposed, however many of them are associated with the verbs 向かう (mukau, “to go towards”) and 迎える (mukaeru, “to receive”), both derived from 向く (muku, “to turn toward”), from Proto-Japonic *muk-, from the idea of "the facing party, the other person (of a pair)"; see also 向こう (mukō, “the other side, the facing side”). Theories to explain this inconsistency in the proto-forms have not been published yet.”
Source: Wiktionary: 婿 (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 婿 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not むこ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
もこ
- “*/moko/ → ⟨mo₍₁₎ko₁⟩ → */mʷokʷo/ → /moko/”
- “From other Old Japanese dialects besides Central Old Japanese, with a conserved */o/ as ⟨o₁⟩.”
- “Possibly cognate or otherwise related with Old Japanese もこ (mo₁ko₁, “companion, fellow”).”
せい
- “From Middle Chinese 婿 (MC sejH).”
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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.