First opened Tuesday, August 3, 2010
必ず
かならず
- flat (heiban)
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).
surely, certainly
Kanarazu is literally “not temporary”: 仮ならず (kari narazu), shifted via karunarazu.
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 必
In a sentence
必ずやります。
I'll do it by all means.
人は必ず死ぬ。
Man is mortal.
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.
- “/kari narazu/ → /karunarazu/ → /kanːarazu/ → /kanarazu/”
- “Shift from 仮(かり)ならず (kari narazu), itself from 仮(かり) (kari, “temporary”) + ならず (narazu), in which the second element is the negative form of either the Classical Japanese copula なり (nari) or the verb なる (naru, “to become”). Therefore, the literal meaning is “not temporary” or “not becoming temporary”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 必ず (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.