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First opened Wednesday, August 31, 2005

生意気

なまいき

Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.

impertinent, impudent

JLPT N2Commonadjectival nouns or quasi-adjectives (keiyodoshi)noun (common) (futsuumeishi)混種語 · HybridCompoundSound change

Namaiki is 生 (nama-, “raw → inexperienced, saucy”) plus 意気 (iki, “spirit”).

Taken apart

  1. 生

    なま

    raw → inexperienced, saucy

  2. 意気

    いき

    spirit

Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.

Written with 生意気

In a sentence

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 生 (nama-, “raw → inexperienced, saucy”) + 意気 (iki, “spirit”).”

Source: Wiktionary: 生意気 (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

混種語 Hybrid
Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
Compound
Two or more words or stems joined into one.
Sound change
The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.

More like this

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Also opened on August 31

The words that opened on this day of the year in other years, oldest first. They share only the date: nothing else links them.

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Origins quoted from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Kaikki.org; meanings & kanji from JMdict, KANJIDIC2 & KRADFILE (EDRDG, CC BY-SA 4.0) — how we check it