First opened Wednesday, May 19, 2010
涼しい
すずしい
- 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).
cool, refreshing (in reference to weather)
Suzushii may ultimately derive from onomatopoeia; compare 涼む (suzumu, “to cool down”).
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 涼
In a sentence
涼しくなりました。
It has cooled off.
涼しくなってきた。
The weather is becoming cooler.
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 Old Japanese 涼し (sususi, suzusi, “cold, refreshing, cool”), following シク活用 (shiku katsuyō, “-shiku conjugation”). First cited to the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, and the Man'yōshū, completed sometime after 759 CE.”
- “May ultimately derive from onomatopoeia. Compare 涼む (suzumu, “to cool down”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 涼しい (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.