First opened Wednesday, July 30, 2008
若々しい
わかわかしい
- 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).
youthful, young
若々しい doubles 若 (waka) and adds the suffix しい (-shii).
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 若
In a sentence
彼女は相変わらず若々しい。
She looks as young as ever.
彼は年をとっていてもまだ若々しい。
He is old, but he's worn well.
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.
- “Reduplication of 若(わか) (waka), the stem of 若(わか)い (wakai, “young”), suffixed with しい (-shii).”
Source: Wiktionary: 若々しい (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.