First opened Monday, November 14, 2005
やはり
やはり
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.
as I thought, absolutely
Yahari may be a hypercorrect back-formation from やっぱり (yappari).
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
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Tatoeba export has no sentence with a translation that uses this word and passes our filter.
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Frellesvig views the pronunciation yahari as a hypercorrect back-formation from やっぱり (yappari), since intervocalic -p- would typically yield -w- and not -h- in modern Japanese. Compare the yapa- root in 柔(やわ)らか (yaparaka → yawaraka, “soft; pliant”), thought to be related. The pronunciation may be due to a spelling pronunciation of やはり, which could ambiguously represent yawari, yafari~yahari, or yappari in older texts. Dictionaries generally consider やはり the older form.”
- “/japari/ → /jaɸari/ → /jahari/”
- “/japari/ → (emphatic) /jappari/ → (back-formation) /jahari/”
Source: Wiktionary: やはり (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.