First opened Friday, June 25, 2010
忙しい
いそがしい
- 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).
busy (people, days)
Isogashii is derived from the verb 急ぐ (isogu, “to hurry”), first attested in a text from 850.
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 忙
In a sentence
僕は忙しい。
I'm busy.
私は忙しい。
I'm busy.
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.
- “Derived from verb 急ぐ (isogu, “to hurry, to rush, to hasten”).”
- “First attested in a text from 850.”
- Hedged“By one analysis, this is the verb's 未然形 (mizenkei, “incomplete or irrealis form”) 急が (isoga) plus the adjectivizing suffix しい (-shii, “having that kind of quality”, classical terminal form -shi).”
- Hedged“Alternatively, may be derived from the causative. The classical terminal form of the adjective is identical to the classical continuative or infinitive form of the causative verb, which was used in certain constructions to conclude sentences.”
- “* 急ぐ (isogu, “to rush, to hurry”) → 急がす (isogasu, “to cause to rush, to cause to hurry”) → 急がし (isogashi, “having the quality of causing one to rush or hurry”)”
Source: Wiktionary: 忙しい (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).
Other readings of 忙しい on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not いそがしい. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
せわしい
- “*⟨sepasi⟩ → /seɸaɕi/ → /sewaɕiki/ → /sewaɕiː/”
- “May be cognate with 狭い (sebai), older form of 狭い (semai, “adjective, lacking in space”), expanding on the meaning towards “lacking in time”.”
- “First cited to a text from 1020.”
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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.