First opened Saturday, June 24, 2006
幸い
さいわい
- flat (heiban)
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).
fortunately; luckily
Saiwai is derived from sakiwai, and began as sakipapi.
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 幸
In a sentence
幸い天気は良かった。
Fortunately, the weather was good.
不幸の裏には幸いあり。
Every cloud has a silver lining.
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.
- “/sakipapi/ → /sakiɸaɸi/ → /sakiwawi/ → /sakiwai/ → /saiwai/”
- “Derived from sakiwai below.”
- “Most often spelled as 幸い with the final い to indicate the reading.”
Source: Wiktionary: 幸い (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 幸い on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not さいわい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
さきわい
- “/sakipapi/ → /sakiɸaɸi/ → /sakiwahi/ → /sakiwai/”
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 幸う (sakiwau, “to meet with good fortune; to prosper”), itself a compound of 幸 (saki, “good fortune, happiness”) + 這う (hau, “to spread out widely”).”
- “Most often spelled as 幸い with the final い to indicate the reading.”
さちわい
- “/sat͡ɕipapi/ → /sat͡ɕiɸaɸi/ → /sat͡ɕiwahi/ → /sat͡ɕiwai/”
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 幸う (sachiwau, “to meet with good fortune; to prosper”), itself a compound of 幸 (sachi, “good fortune, happiness”) + 這う (hau, “to spread out widely”).”
- “Most often spelled as 幸い with the final い to indicate the reading.”
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.