Explore each form from the oldest known stage to today.
Historical forms are not available yet. The current form is shown as a reference.
The kanji 岬 is a phono-semantic compound, formed by combining the semantic component 山 (mountain) with the phonetic component 甲. The character originated in China, where it was created to represent a geographical feature: a promontory or cape, which is essentially a mountain or high land projecting into a body of water. The 山 component directly signifies this "mountain" or "high land" meaning. The 甲 component, whose original meanings include "armor" and "first," was chosen primarily for its phonetic value to suggest the pronunciation in Old Chinese, rather than for its semantic meaning. Historically, the character 岬 is not found in the earliest Chinese classics like the Shuowen Jiezi, indicating it is a later creation to describe a specific landform. Its development followed the standard structural evolution from seal script to clerical script, and finally to the modern block form used today. The character, along with the vast majority of the kanji system, was imported to Japan in waves, primarily through the introduction of Chinese literature and Buddhism from around the 5th century CE. It was incorporated into the Japanese writing system and assigned the native Japanese kun'yomi readings "misaki" and "saki." Linguistically, the kun'yomi "misaki" is the common term for "cape" or "promontory" in modern Japanese. The reading "saki" (also written as 崎) is used in many geographical names and carries a nearly identical meaning, highlighting the subtle nuances that can exist between similar kanji. The character 岬 is a clear example of how a logographic script efficiently creates new terms by combining a radical for category (mountain) with another character to hint at sound, allowing for the precise representation of a complex geographical concept.