First opened Friday, February 26, 2010
楽しい
たのしい
- 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).
enjoyable, fun
Nobody knows where たのしい comes from, and all three theories have problems.
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 楽
In a sentence
楽しい旅を。
Enjoy your trip.
旅行は楽しい。
It's fun to travel.
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.
- “⟨tano₁siki₁⟩ → */tanʷosikʲi/ → /tanoshii/”
- Hedged“From Old Japanese. First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE. No Ryukyuan cognates exist; as a result, further derivation unknown. Theories include:”
- “* A compound of 手 (ta, “hand”, combining form) + 伸す (nosu, “to extend”)”
- “*: This is problematic, as nosu has first been attested starting from the early 900s, with no A/B distinction (see Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai for details).”
- “* From 田神 (tano, literally “rice paddy god”)”
- “*: No reading of 神 (*no, “god”) exists.”
- Hedged“* A borrowing from an unknown language”
- “*: No words resemble *tanV meaning "fun" or "to enjoy".”
Source: Wiktionary: 楽しい (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.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.