First opened Thursday, August 13, 2009
派手
はで
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 2
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).
showy, flashy, gaudy
“Flashy” may come from a lively “breaking melody” on the shamisen — the 派 is only ateji.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
In a sentence
これは派手すぎる。
This is too bright.
このネクタイは派手すぎますよ。
I'm afraid this tie is too loud.
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.
- Hedged“Probably from 破手 (hade, “breaking melody”, in reference to a lively style of samisen playing), or possibly a shift from haede, as a compound of 映え (hae, “shining; glory”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 映える (haeru, “to shine; to be glorious, to be outstanding”)) + 手 (te, “hand; style, way, state”). The te changes to de as an instance of rendaku (連濁).”
- “Appears from the late 1600s.”
- “The use of the 派 character is an example of ateji (当(あ)て字(じ)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 派手 (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
- 混種語 Hybrid
- Words that mix layers, e.g. a native part with a Chinese one.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Rendaku
- The first sound of the second part voices when two native words join (kami → -gami).
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.