First opened Wednesday, June 10, 2009
大人しい
おとなしい
- 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).
obedient, docile, quiet
“Docile” is “adult” plus an adjective-forming ending.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
彼は性格がおとなしい。
He has a mild nature.
彼女はおとなしい性質だ。
She has a gentle disposition.
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.
- “Compound of 大人(おとな) (otona, “adult”) + しい (-shii, adjectivizing suffix).”
Source: Wiktionary: 大人しい (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
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.