First opened Thursday, May 24, 2012
渚
なぎさ
- 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).
water's edge, beach, shore
Nagisa is from Old Japanese, possibly 凪ぎ (nagi, “calming, dying down”) plus 磯 (sa, “rocky shore, pebble beach”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 渚
In a sentence
渚に人が群がっていた。
There were flocks of people on the beach.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “⟨naɡi₁sa⟩ → */naɡʲisa/ → /naɡisa/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“Possibly a compound of 凪(な)ぎ (nagi, “calming, dying down”, the 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 凪(な)ぐ (nagu, “to calm down, to die down”, as of waves or wind), cognate with 和(なご)やか (nagoyaka, “calm, quiet”)) + 磯(さ) (sa, “rocky shore, pebble beach”), where sa is an ancient alternative for so, the abbreviated combining reading of modern 磯(いそ) (iso), cognate with 石(いし) (ishi, “rock, stone”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 渚 (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 渚 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not なぎさ. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
みぎわ
- “⟨mi₁ ki₁pa⟩ → */mʲiɡʲipa/ → /miɡifa/ → /miɡiwa/”
- “Compound of 水(み) (mi, “water”, combining form of 水(みず) (mizu)) + 際(きわ) (kiwa, “edge, boundary”). The kiwa changes to giwa as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.