First opened Wednesday, June 30, 2010
悲しい
かなしい
- 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).
sad, sorrowful
Kanashii historically also meant “dear; beloved; lovely”, in addition to “sad”.
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 悲
In a sentence
悲しいです。
I'm sad.
ああ悲しい。
Ah, me!
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.
- “⟨kanasiki₁⟩ → /kanasiki/ → /kanaɕiː/”
- “From Old Japanese 悲し (kanasi-, “emotionally overwhelming: dear, beloved, sad”), ultimately from Proto-Japonic *kanasi- (“beloved, dear”). First attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE.”
- “Historically also meant "dear; beloved; lovely", in addition to "sad". The former senses were later taken over by other adjectives such as 愛らしい (airashii), 愛しい (itoshii), and 可愛い (kawaii). See also the Ryukyuan cognates such as Miyako かなすぃ゚ (kanasï) and Okinawan かなさん (kanasan, “beloved, lovely, cute”), which do not mean "sad".”
- Hedged“Considering the original sense of "emotionally overwhelming", might be cognate with 兼ねる (kaneru, “to group together; to be concerned about something”), from the semantic overlap with grief.”
Source: Wiktionary: 悲しい (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.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.