First opened Thursday, July 23, 2009
可愛い
かわいい
- 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).
cute, adorable
“Cute” began as “embarrassing, shameful” — and the kanji have nothing to do with the sound.
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.
In a sentence
彼女らはかわいい。
They are pretty.
君はなんてかわいい。
You're such a cute boy.
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.
- “/kawajui/ → /kawaiː/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from kawayui below.”
- “The kanji spelling 可愛い is an example of ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)), and uses an irregular reading of 愛. The phonological resemblance to Mandarin 可愛 (kě'ài), Min Nan 可愛 (khó-ài, “lovable”) is coincidental. Note that the medial -w- here is not an excrescence added between ka (可) and ai (愛), since the word is not formed from these morphemes.”
- Hedged“Already realized phonetically as /kawaiː/ by the early 1600s, and possibly found alongside older form kawayui, as seen in the 1603 edition of the Nippo Jisho.”
Source: Wiktionary: 可愛い (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).
Other readings of 可愛い on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not かわいい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
かわゆい
- “From classical Japanese /kawo hajuɕi/ → /kawajui/.”
- “A contraction of classical 顔映し (kawahayushi, “embarrassing, shameful”). The meaning underwent an ameliorative semantic shift from shameful to evoking pity, to evoking compassion, and then to lovable. The kanji spelling appears to be jukujikun (熟(じゅく)字(じ)訓(くん)), from the above reading. Compare Korean 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da), which originally meant poor (as in "poor, poor kid") but now means pretty.”
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.