First opened Saturday, November 19, 2005
正しい
ただしい
- 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).
correct
Tadashii is 直 (tada, “straight; direct; straightforward”) plus the adjective suffix し, first appearing in 858 CE.
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.
Written with 正
In a sentence
大体正しい。
That's mostly right.
僕が正しいと思う。
I think I'm right.
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.
- “Derived from 直 (tada, “straight; direct; straightforward”) + し (-shi, adjective-forming suffix, origin of and superseded by modern しい (shii)).”
- “First appears in 858 CE in the 大智度論 (Daichido-ron), the Japanese rendering of the Chinese text Da zhidu lun. Used primarily in 漢文訓読 (kanbun kundoku, “Japanese-language readings of Classical Chinese texts”, literally “Chinese text, meaning (Japanese) reading”) contexts, with almost no usage in 和文 (wabun, “Japanese texts”) or kana contexts until after the Heian Period.”
Source: Wiktionary: 正しい (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).
Other readings of 正しい on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ただしい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
まさしい
- “Derived from 正 (masa, “right, proper; just, fair; straight-grained (as of wood); straight”) + し (-shi, adjective-forming suffix, superseded in modern usage by しい (shii)).”
- “First appears in an 830 CE copy of the 金光明最勝王経 (Konkōmyō Saishō Ō Kyō, “Golden Light Sutra”) in a 漢文訓読 (kanbun kundoku, “Japanese-language readings of Classical Chinese texts”, literally “Chinese text, meaning (Japanese) reading”) context, and later phonetically in the 905 CE work 古今和歌集 (Kokin Wakashū, “Collection of Japanese Poems of Ancient and Modern Times”).”
- “Still in use in the early 1600s, then apparently falling into partial disuse. The full adjective form masashii is no longer included in some dictionaries. Persists in dialect in the modern language, and as adverbial form 正しく (masashiku).”
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.