First opened Thursday, October 28, 2010
弱い
よわい
- 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).
weak
Yowai was 弱し in Old Japanese, and a king's name varies between 目弱王 and 眉輪王.
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 弱
In a sentence
地理は弱い。
I am weak in geography.
私は船に弱い。
I am a bad sailor.
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 弱し (*yo₁wasi), from Proto-Japonic *yowa-.”
- “Although not phonetically attested in Old Japanese texts in man'yōgana, the name of a king varies between 目弱王 in the Kojiki and 眉輪王, read as mayo₁wa-WAU in the Nihon Shoki.”
Source: Wiktionary: 弱い (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.