First opened Friday, August 22, 2008
羨ましい
うらやましい
- 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).
envious, enviable
羨ましい is 羨む (urayamu, “to envy, to be jealous of”) plus しい (-shii), an adjectivizing suffix.
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 羨
In a sentence
私は彼がうらやましい。
I envy him.
君の幸運がうらやましい。
I envy you your luck.
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 羨(うらや)む (urayamu, “to envy, to be jealous of”, mizenkei form 羨(うらや)ま (urayama)) + しい (-shii, adjectivizing suffix evoking quality of the suffixed term).羨(うらや)む (urayamu) is from 心(うら) (ura, “heart, inner feelings”) + 病(や)む (yamu, “affected, afflicted, worried”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 羨ましい (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.