First opened Friday, May 27, 2005
にっこり
にっこり
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
smile sweetly, smile, grin
Nikkori comes from nikori, “with a bright smile”, whose niko part is onomatopoeic for smiling.
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.
In a sentence
彼女はにっこり笑った。
She smiled.
キムはにっこり笑った。
Kim smiled sweetly.
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.
- “From にこり (nikori, “with a bright smile”). The element にこ (niko) is onomatopoeic for smiling, and also seen in にこにこ (nikoniko, “with a grin, smile”) and にこやか (nikoyaka, “smiling”).”
Source: Wiktionary: にっこり (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).
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.