First opened Sunday, May 6, 2007
幸せ
しあわせ
- 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).
happiness, blessing
Shiawase is the stem of 為合わす (shiawasu, “to put together well”), a compound of 為 (su, “to do”) and 合わす (awasu, “to join together”).
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
彼女は彼と一緒にいるときが一番しあわせそうです。
She looks happiest when she is with him.
すると、あなたはお金をもらえてしあわせでしょう。
Then you will have money and you will be happy.
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.
- “The 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 為合わす, 仕合わす (shiawasu, “to put together well; to work together well”, lower bigrade, with continuative form ending in -e), itself a compound of Old Japanese verbs 為 (su, “to do, to make something be a certain way”) + 合わす (awasu, “to join together, to fit together”).”
- “Often spelled 幸せ with the final せ to indicate the reading.”
Source: Wiktionary: 幸せ (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.