First opened Sunday, March 7, 2010
皮肉
ひにく
Pitch accent: We don't have the data for this section. No accent list gives this spelling and reading, or the two we check against disagree.
cynicism, sarcasm
“Skin and flesh” became “sarcasm” through a Zen test of understanding.
Taken apart
Select a part to see every word so far that is taken apart with it.
Wiktionary's text doesn't split this word, so each part is one of its kanji (with the okurigana written after it), with the reading and the dictionary meaning KANJIDIC2 gives that character — a word doesn't always use every sense of its kanji.
In a sentence
彼はいつも私に皮肉を言う。
He always makes cynical remarks to me.
彼女は少し皮肉っぽく話した。
She spoke with a suggestion of sarcasm in her voice.
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 Middle Chinese 皮肉 (MC bje nyuwk), literally “skin and meat”.”
- “Originally a Buddhist term from the Zen expression 皮肉骨髄 (“skin, flesh, bones, and marrow”) used to evaluate disciples’ understanding, where “bones and marrow” represent the core truth, and “skin and meat” symbolize the superficial understanding.”
- “As a result, it came to refer to shallow criticism (pointing out faults without addressing the essence) and irony in modern Japanese.”
Source: Wiktionary: 皮肉 (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
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Borrowing
- Taken over from another language.