First opened Friday, July 30, 2010
寂しい
さびしい
- 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).
lonely, lonesome
Sabishii was sabusi in the Man'yōshū, and dialect shifts from b to m created samishi.
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 寂
In a sentence
彼は大変さびしいと思った。
He felt very lonely.
このへんはとてもさびしい。
This neighborhood is very lonely.
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. First attested as sabusi in the Man'yōshū, completed sometime around 759 CE.”
- “Generally thought to derive from 荒ぶ (sabu, “to be desolate, to be lonely”), modern 錆びる (sabiru, “to rust, to get old”, intransitive).”
- “In early modern times, some dialects shift in reading from /-b-/ to /-m-/, thus creating samishii; similar to 頭 (tsuburi, tsumuri, “head”), in which tsuburi changes to tsumuri, and 煙 (keburi, kemuri, “smoke”), in which keburi changes to kemuri.”
Source: Wiktionary: 寂しい (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.