First opened Saturday, June 4, 2005
可愛らしい
かわいらしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 5
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).
lovely, sweet
Kawairashii is 可愛い (kawaii) plus the ending らしい (-rashii).
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
彼女はとてもかわいらしい。
She is as pretty as anything.
彼には、かわいらしい娘がいる。
He has a daughter who is pretty.
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 可愛(かわい)い (kawaii) + らしい (-rashii).”
Source: Wiktionary: 可愛らしい (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).