First opened Wednesday, September 9, 2009
明るい
あかるい
- flat (heiban)
- 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).
bright (in reference to personality or weather); cheerful
“Bright” is probably a verb for “brighten” with an old adjective ending, first attested in 1689.
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.
Written with 明
In a sentence
明るい気分になる。
It makes me feel cheerful.
彼は明るい少年だ。
He is a cheerful 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.
- Hedged“Appears to be a compound of Classical Japanese 明る (akaru, “to brighten”) + し (shi, “adjectival suffix”). This adjectival suffix forms a classical ク活用 (ku-katsuyō, “ku-adjective”).”
- “First attested in 1689.”
Source: Wiktionary: 明るい (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.