秋刀魚

Noun

 * 1) Pacific saury

Etymology
, theories include:
 * An alteration from earlier compound + :
 * An alternative derivation suggests +, where ma again references the narrowness of the fish's body, but this is problematic, as  can only refer to the space between things, not the width of a thing itself.
 * Another possibility is that sanma is cognate with . The two kinds of fish are somewhat similar, and sanma is even called in English. In addition, the voiced plosive  sound in modern Japanese appears to have been pre-nasalized in Old Japanese as something closer to, and there is evidence of  ⇔  alternation in various terms in Japanese. There is also 🇨🇬, likely a borrowing either into or from Japanese. This suggests that modern sanma may have arisen as an  ⇔  alteration of older sanba.
 * Another possibility is that sanma is cognate with . The two kinds of fish are somewhat similar, and sanma is even called in English. In addition, the voiced plosive  sound in modern Japanese appears to have been pre-nasalized in Old Japanese as something closer to, and there is evidence of  ⇔  alternation in various terms in Japanese. There is also 🇨🇬, likely a borrowing either into or from Japanese. This suggests that modern sanma may have arisen as an  ⇔  alteration of older sanba.

The 秋刀魚 spelling likely arose quite recently in 1922 during the, when a popular poem by used this spelling. It alludes to the fish's harvest season of autumn and its blade-shaped body.

Noun

 * 1) the Pacific saury or mackerel pike,