Kanji 首 neck, counter for songs and poems 都 metropolis, capital, all Related words 首府 also means 'capital' but is more formal and less commonly used in everyday Japanese than 首都 .
都 can mean a historical or culturally important capital and has a literary feel, while 首都 is the plain modern term for a country's political capital.
都市 means 'city' in general, whereas 首都 refers specifically to the capital city of a country.
首都 is the standard modern word for a capital city, while 都 in this sense is an archaic or literary term rarely used alone in modern speech.
首都 refers to the capital of an entire country, while 州都 specifically means the capital of a state or province within a country.
Don't confuse with 首都 means the capital city itself, whereas 首都圏 refers to the wider metropolitan region surrounding that capital.
都心 means the central business/commercial area of a city, while 首都 means 'capital city' of a country, a different concept entirely.
Word family temporary capital; provisional capital
Tokyo near-field earthquake; major earthquake directly under the Tokyo metropolitan area
Tokyo near-field earthquake; large-scale earthquake directly hitting the Tokyo area
Etymology A Sino-Japanese compound: 首 means 'chief' or 'main,' and 都 means 'capital' or 'city.' The compound is conventionally understood as 'chief city' or 'capital.'
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