First opened Saturday, October 16, 2010
大きい
おおきい
- 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).
big, large
Ōkii went opoki → oɸoki → oɸokiki → owokiː → oːkiː, and appears in the Muromachi period.
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 大
In a sentence
彼は声が大きい。
He has a loud voice.
彼は手が大きい。
He has big hands.
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.
- “/opoki/ → /oɸoki/ → /oɸokiki/ → /owokiː/ → /oːkiː/”
- “Appears in the Muromachi period, 1337 to 1573 CE.”
- Hedged“From older adjective 大(おお)き (ōki, ancient reading opoki), derived as the attributive form ōki (ancient opoki) of cognate adjective ōshi (ancient oposi; attributive opoki appearing already in the Man'yōshū of 759 CE, meaning both “large” or “many”, spelled as 多(おお)し (ōshi) or 大(おお)し (ōshi), modern Japanese 多(おお)い (ōi, “many”)), in turn derived from Old Japanese adjective opo (“indistinct; of uncertain size, shape, or amount”; read as ō in modern Japanese, spelled as 凡 or 大).”
Source: Wiktionary: 大きい (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.
- Origin unclear
- Scholars disagree, or nobody knows.