First opened Sunday, March 12, 2006
うるさい
うるさい
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.
noisy; annoying
Urusai is probably 心 (uru, “heart, mind”) plus 狭し (sashi, “tight; narrow”): something so overwhelming that one feels pressured.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts 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“Probably originally a compound of 心 (uru, “heart, mind”, vowel-shifted from regular reading ura, cognate with 裏 (ura, “the behind or inside of something”)) + 狭し (sashi, “tight; narrow”, Classical and Old Japanese, cognate and synonym of modern 狭い (semai)), from the sense that something is so overwhelming that one feels pressured to yield or submit in some way.”
- “The earliest texts used this word to mean something more like "overwhelmed by how completely thorough something is (in a positive sense), or by how excessive and repetitive something is (in a negative sense)". Over time, the term was used less and less in a positive sense, and the focus from the late Heian period gradually became a negative sense of oppression and annoyance from something troublesome, repetitive, or overwhelming. Usage then shifted further, such that the term described not the speaker's own internal state, but rather the troublesome quality of the cause of the emotional response.”
- “First cited to works from the early 900s.”
Source: Wiktionary: うるさい (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).
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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.