First opened Saturday, October 20, 2012
魂
たましい
- 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).
soul, spirit
Tamashii is 魂 (tama, “soul, spirit”) plus an uncertain shii, possibly 強ひ (shihi), from the classical verb 強ふ.
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 魂
In a sentence
彼の魂に平和を！
Peace to his ashes!
人の魂は不滅だ。
A person's soul is immortal.
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.
- “⟨tamasipi₁⟩ → */tamasipʲi/ → /tamaɕifi/ → /tamaɕiwi/ → /tamaɕiː/”
- “From Old Japanese.”
- Hedged“Compound of 魂 (tama, “soul, spirit”, see below) and an uncertain shii, possibly 強ひ (shihi → shii), the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of classical verb 強ふ (shifu → shiu), modern 強いる (shiiru, “to force, compel”).”
- “From Old Japanese, from Proto-Japonic *tama.”
- “Thought to be cognate with 玉 (tama, “jewel”), but note differences in pitch accent.”
Source: Wiktionary: 魂 (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 魂 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not たましい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
こん
- “From Middle Chinese 魂 (MC hwon).”
- “Compare modern Mandarin 魂 (hún)”
こころ
- “From 心 (kokoro, “heart, mind, spirit”).”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.