First opened Sunday, December 23, 2007
仕方がない
しかたがない
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.
it can't be helped, it's inevitable
Shikata ga nai is literally “there is no way”.
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.
In a sentence
仕方がないよ。
There is no choice.
彼を待つより仕方がない。
All we can do is to wait for 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.
- “Phrase composed of 仕方がない (shikata ga nai, literally “there is no way”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 仕方がない (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.