First opened Wednesday, October 20, 2010
狭い
せまい
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
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).
narrow; not spacious
Semai was originally sebashi, before it became semashi and then lost its medial k.
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 狭
In a sentence
彼は肩幅が狭い。
He has narrow shoulders.
狭き門より入れ。
Enter by the narrow gate.
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 Early Middle Japanese adjective 狭(せま)し (semashi), with the 終(しゅう)止(し)形(けい) (shūshikei, “predicative form”) ending in し (shi) first replaced with the 連(れん)体(たい)形(けい) (rentaikei, “attributive form”) ending in き (ki), and then with the medial /-k-/ falling out to result in an ending of い (i). Originally 狭し (sebashi); underwent a sound change from /b/ to /m/, similar to 寂しい (sabishii, samishii, “lonely, desolate”), 頭 (tsuburi, tsumuri, “head”), and 煙 (keburi, kemuri, “smoke”).”
- “Cognate with 攻(せ)める (semeru), 責(せ)める (semeru), 迫(せま)る (semaru), 狭(せば)める (sebameru), and 狭(せば)まる (sebamaru), and 窄(すば)る (subaru, “to become narrow”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 狭い (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.