First opened Thursday, April 19, 2007
思わず
おもわず
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.
unintentional, spontaneous
Omowazu is the negative continuative of 思う.
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 思
In a sentence
彼は思わず笑った。
He laughed in spite of himself.
私は思わず泣いた。
I wept in spite of myself.
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.
- “From the negative continuative of 思う.”
Source: Wiktionary: 思わず (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.