First opened Sunday, June 7, 2009
懐かしい
なつかしい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 4
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).
dear, desired, missed
“Nostalgic” first meant wanting to keep something close — and only later became about remembering.
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 懐
In a sentence
私は彼の授業がなつかしい。
I miss his lessons so much.
彼女は懐かしい思い出にふけった。
She indulged herself in nostalgic memories.
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.
- “Originally derived from verb 懐(なつ)く (natsuku, “to get used to and keep close; to become fond of”), itself an abbreviation of 馴(な)れ付(つ)く (naretsuku) of the same meaning. The adjective originally described wanting to keep something close, wanting to express fondness for something. Over time, this term was used more to describe reminiscences, leading to the modern meaning.”
- “First attested in the Man'yōshū poetry anthology completed in 759 CE.”
Source: Wiktionary: 懐かしい (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.
- Clipping
- A longer word or phrase shortened in everyday use.