First opened Sunday, April 9, 2006
しつこい
しつこい
- 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).
insistent, obstinate
Shitsukoi has no certain origin: the second element could be 濃い (koi, “thick”), and the first is uncertain.
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“The second element could be 濃(こ)い (koi, “thick”), and the first element remains uncertain. It could be 為付(しつ)ける (shitsukeru, “to accustom”), but is semantically problematic.”
- Hedged“Another theory regards it as a deverbal adjective of 執(しっ)する (shissuru, “to insist”) and thinks that it was contaminated by 懐(なつ)こい (natsukoi, “easy to become acquainted with anyone”) and 熱濃(ねつこ)い (netsukoi, “enthusiastic; persistent”), but the earlier meaning of this word is "very rich and thick", so this theory is also historical semantically problematic.”
- “Morphologically, just like 懐(なつ)く (natsuku) and 懐(なつ)こい (natsukoi), 執拗(しつこ)い (shitsukoi)”
- “could be also derived from 為付(しつ)く (shitsuku, “to become practised”), but is still problematic on meaning.”
Source: Wiktionary: しつこい (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.