First opened Monday, October 19, 2009
面白い
おもしろい
- 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).
interesting, amusing
“Interesting” is literally “face-white”, with cousins in Okinawan and Miyako.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
In a sentence
結構面白い。
It's so exciting.
面白いですね。
It's interesting.
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.
- “From 面 (omo, “face”) + 白い (shiroi, “white”).”
- “Cognate with Okinawan うむっさん (umussan) and Miyako うむっし (umusshi).”
Source: Wiktionary: 面白い (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.