First opened Thursday, October 25, 2007
辛い
からい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
hot and spicy; salty
Karai is first attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, from Proto-Japonic *kara.
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 辛
In a sentence
なんだかすごく辛いの。
Somehow it's been a rough day.
このカレーは辛すぎる。
This curry is too hot.
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 Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE. From Proto-Japonic *kara.”
Source: Wiktionary: 辛い (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 辛い on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not からい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
つらい
- “From Old Japanese. First attested in the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE.”
づらい
- “The tsurai changes to zurai as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
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.