First opened Friday, August 31, 2007
力強い
ちからづよい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 5
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).
powerful, strong, vigorous
Chikarazuyoi is 力 (chikara, “power, strength”) plus 強い (tsuyoi), with tsuyoi voiced to zuyoi.
Taken apart
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In a sentence
なるほどこの車は小さいが力強い。
Indeed this car is small, but it is powerful.
彼の力強い演説は聴衆をぐいぐいひっぱっていった。
His powerful speech carried the audience with him.
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.
- “Compound of 力(ちから) (chikara, “power, strength”) + 強(つよ)い (tsuyoi, “strong, powerful”). The tsuyoi changes to zuyoi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
Source: Wiktionary: 力強い (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).