First opened Saturday, February 13, 2010
新しい
あたらしい
- 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).
new
新しい was once “aratashi”: two syllables swapped places about a thousand years ago.
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 新
In a sentence
この本は新しい。
This book is new.
彼の考えは新しい。
His ideas are up to date.
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.
- “/arataɕi/ → /ataraɕi/ → /ataraɕiki/ → /ataraɕiː/”
- “In Old Japanese, the original term was 新たし (aratashi), composed of older 新た (arata, “new”) + adjective-forming suffix し (shi). This persisted until at least the mid-1200s, and indeed the adjective stem arata is both modern adjective 新た (arata, -na adjective) and the root of verbs such as 改める (aratameru, “to renew, refresh, revise, or reform something”). See 新た (arata) for further details of that etymology.”
- Hedged“Starting from the 900s, the aratashi reading began shifting to atarashi. This metathesis may have been due to conflation with 可惜し (atarashi, “magnificent, excellent, precious; regrettable”). The aratashi reading then became more and more uncommon in Early Middle Japanese, and the “new, modern, fresh” sense became the main use, superseding the largely homophonous 可惜し (atarashi) and pushing it out of common usage.”
- “The modern form is from Early Middle Japanese adjective 新(あたら)し (atarashi), with the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “predicative form”) ending in し (shi) first replaced with the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) ending in しき (shiki), and then with the medial /-k-/ falling out to result in an ending of しい (shii).”
- “Displaced Old Japanese 新し (nipisi, adjective). This is reflected in the modern language as prefixing stem 新 (nii-), which is no longer productive.”
Source: Wiktionary: 新しい (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.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.