First opened Sunday, August 12, 2007
素直
すなお
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
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).
obedient, meek, docile
Sunao is, by surface analysis, 素 (su, “plain”) plus 直 (nao, “straight”).
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は実に素直な人だ。
He is an extremely frank person.
彼は素直に私の欠点を指摘した。
He frankly pointed out my faults.
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.
- “By surface analysis, 素(す) (su, “plain”) + 直(なお) (nao, “straight”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 素直 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.