First opened Saturday, October 24, 2009
幼い
おさない
- 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).
very young, childish
“Very young” may once have meant “without a chief”.
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.
Written with 幼
In a sentence
彼の考えはとても幼い。
His way of thinking is very childish.
幼い子供は語彙が少ない。
A young child has a small vocabulary.
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“Possibly from Old Japanese. Japanese dictionaries cite the word to the Nihon Shoki (720), but only where kana glosses read 不賢 (literally “not mature; not capable”) as ヲサナシ (wosanasi). The first actual phonetic attestation is in the Shinsen Jikyō (898-901), as 乎佐奈志.”
- “Compound of 長 (osa, “chief, senior”) + 無い (nai, “not”, from classical 無し (nashi)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 幼い (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.