First opened Wednesday, October 10, 2012
瞬き
まばたき
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
wink, twinkling (of stars), flicker (of light)
Mabataki is the continuative stem of the verb 瞬く (matataku, “to blink”).
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 瞬
In a sentence
まばたきのように素早い。
As quick as a wink.
彼女はまばたきして涙を止めようとした。
She blinked to stop the tears.
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.
- “連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 瞬(またた)く (matataku, “to blink”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 瞬き (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).