First opened Wednesday, May 21, 2008
苦しい
くるしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 3
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).
tough; physically strenuous
苦しい is analysed as a compound of ⟨kuru-⟩, which indicates stress or temper, and the adjectivizing suffix ⟨-si⟩.
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 苦
In a sentence
良薬は口に苦し。
A good medicine tastes bitter.
苦しい、やめろ。
It's so painful. Stop it!
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.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. First cited to the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, and likely extant earlier as the intransitive verb 苦しむ (kurushimu, “to suffer, to be stressed out”) was first cited to the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Analyzable as a compound of bound morpheme ⟨kuru-⟩ (indicates stress or temper) + ⟨-si⟩ (adjectivizing suffix, gives object the possession of the adjective's quality), ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kuru. Compare 狂う (kuruu, “to be mad, to get angry”). Compare also Miyako 苦 (guri) against Miyako 悲す (kanasu, Japanese 悲しい (kanashii, “sad”)).”
- “The modern form kurushii is derived from Early Middle Japanese adjective 苦(くる)し (kurushi), with the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “predicative form”) ending in し (shi) first replaced with the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) ending in しき (shiki), and then with the medial /-k-/ falling out to result in an ending of しい (shii).”
Source: Wiktionary: 苦しい (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.