First opened Wednesday, February 24, 2010
美味しい
おいしい
- 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).
delicious, tasty
Delicious began as an honorific: “o-” + “ishii”.
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
とてもおいしいよ。
It tastes very good.
大変おいしいですよ。
It's really good.
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“Originally from 御 (o-, honorific prefix) + 美しい (ishii, “good; delicious”, possibly obsolete in modern contexts; the delicious sense evolved out of 女房詞 (nyōbo kotoba, “women's word”) usage).”
Source: Wiktionary: 美味しい (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
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.