First opened Wednesday, July 13, 2005
ぴかぴか
ぴかぴか
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
glitter, sparkle
Pikapika was written fikafika in a 1595 Latin–Portuguese–Japanese dictionary, a reduplication of the root of 光る (hikaru).
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
ピカピカの新製品です。
It's brand new.
床がピカピカに光っていた。
The floor had a good shine.
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.
- “/fikafika/ → /pikapika/”
- “First attested as ひかひか (fikafika) in the 1595 Dictionarivm Latino Lvsitanicvm, ac Iaponicvm (“Dictionary from Latin into Portuguese, and Japanese”).”
- “Reduplication of the ひか (hika-) root of Old Japanese-derived verb 光る (hikaru, “to shine, to gleam”), which root is from Proto-Japonic *pika. See also *pikaru.”
- “As part of the Late Middle Japanese reintroduction of /p/ as a phoneme, particularly among mimetic words and in some Sino-Japanese compounds, this word regained its original /p/ sound that had by then shifted to /ɸ/.”
Source: Wiktionary: ぴかぴか (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.